W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
Oftentimes because an Express release has worked so stably that
we forget that it was only intended to be a beta.
It is probably time to define some terms, because we may be
talking at cross purposes.
In the "non-Solaris" world, Beta means something like
"The engineers are done adding major features, the product
is close to what is supposed to be, but there is a quality,
testing and/or customer feedback gap that prevents it
from being tagged as a release candidate"
Many years ago, Solaris engineers and product managers decided
that this mode of development was sub-optimal for Sun's massively
distributed and co-dependent development teams. Specifically,
it meant that any time that the gate was not in a coherent state,
some significant part of Sun's distributed development team would
be inconvenienced; further more, every time the gate was allowed
to regress from the release quality requirements, it guaranteed
that more preventable bugs would escape out of development and
grow into customer-discovered problems. This lead to the current
Solaris' goal of having the consolidation gates be at release
quality levels all the time, and is why the gatekeepers are so
quick to back out integrations that break that policy.
Of course, if /every/ build is a release candidate from a quality
perspective*, then there must be something other than quality that
determines whether or not to make a formal release. In Sun's case,
that determination is made based on a large number of criteria,
including customer demand, ISV and VAR readiness to re-certify,
support load costs, migration/transition issues, brand management
and, of course, the old "what are the competitors doing" benchmark.
The Solaris Express and Developer Express releases are just as
much products as Solaris 10 and its Update progeny. The various
differences lie in market positioning and customer segment targeting
much more than any quality concerns.
-John
____
[*] - of course, just because we try to keep things perfect all
the time doesn't mean we are always successful at it :-)
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