Short answer: At Apache, release candidates are not releases and don't appear anywhere that releases do. With respect to the outside world, they are unofficial, intermediate work.
- Dennis This is my understanding: The RC artifacts are made available the same way as developer snapshots and previews. (If you look at the links, you'll see that the RC1 artifacts are on the release manager's Apache account.) The difference is that a release candidate is packaged in the form of artifacts on which release votes happen. When a release vote is held and passes, those are the artifacts that will then be put up as a release, populated on mirrors, etc. Since these candidates are not releases, it is inappropriate to notify the user base, make an ASF announcement, etc. They should not be provided at the download page either. In some sense, there is a feature and code freeze in effect for the release, except for any necessary repairs that require a new candidate to be produced. The need for repair can come about as part of the in-Apache review of the candidate and independently as the result of a release-blocking defect reported by anyone. Because of that level of stability, this is a time when investment of any volunteer testing, trial use, etc., is valuable in both how the candidate deploys and how it is usable. It's not a moving target and additional explorations are well-spent, especially for any show-stopper that is uncovered. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: drew [mailto:d...@baseanswers.com] <http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201204.mbox/%3c1334611284.19386.7.camel@sybil-gnome%3e> Sent: Monday, April 16, 2012 14:21 To: dennis.hamil...@acm.org Cc: OOo-dev Apache Incubator; 'Louis Suárez-Potts' Subject: Re: Expanding Review and Contributions as AOO 3.4 Approaches Howdy, I have a few basic questions - sorry if this has been covered and I missed it. How extensive an announcement are we looking for with this? The files are not on the mirror system at this moment, right, so it's premature to blast out to the full user base, correct? Will the RC files go to the mirrors, BTW, and I suppose in the same question - will the download pages on the main ooo site be used for RC as in the past? If so then that is the point at which we want to promote the RC more broadly, so I would think. Thanks, //drew On Mon, 2012-04-16 at 13:37 -0700, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote: <http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201204.mbox/%3c01df01cd1c10$b4f45ba0$1edd12e0$@acm.org%3e> [ ... ]
