Scott Dial schrieb: > Barry Warsaw wrote: >>> Alterntaively, I guess you could just suggest that people check the >>> buildbot page for their platforms before downloading .... >> >> Yes, good idea. I'm only going to cut source tarballs for the alphas. >> > > I apologize for having doubt in your plan, and I can certainly > appreciate the work you will be doing as release manager. But.. > > I don't understand who these alpha releases are supposed to be for, and > who they will serve. When I first saw this plan, I thought "ok, you're > the man.." But now I wonder even more if they are only going to be > source tarballs. Who is the intended audience of these alphas? It seems > like cutting only source tarballs is targeting developers, and if that > is the case, I wonder if you have misplaced your motivations. > > I'm not sure what developer outside of the core community would want to > work with something missing key features and released fairly > arbitrarily. Ok, I grant you that it's a monthly cycle, but there are no > feature milestones involved, so it's fairly arbitrary from a utility > standpoint; it's not clear to me that we are even worrying about all of > the buildbots being green before releasing. > > More to the point, I don't know why a developer wouldn't just checkout > from SVN in any case. Certainly if they are going to help root out bugs, > then we would like them to be using the trunk if possible. I fear that > once an alpha is 2 weeks old, we will start saying "please check if its > still a problem on the trunk."
For one thing, releases generate "news", meaning that people will be made aware that things are moving, that Python is well underway to its next major versions, and maybe will be more inclined to look at what's new, or check out a release. For some people, the label "alpha X" is more acceptable than "SVN version", even for projects whose SVN trunk is generally quite stable as is the case with Python. Even if that's the only thing accomplished by the alpha releases, they do not do any harm. Georg -- Thus spake the Lord: Thou shalt indent with four spaces. No more, no less. Four shall be the number of spaces thou shalt indent, and the number of thy indenting shall be four. Eight shalt thou not indent, nor either indent thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Tabs are right out. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
