On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 5:06 PM, David Hutto <dwightdhu...@gmail.com> wrote: > Just as a quick survey...Are individual programmers happier with tangling > with the alpha code, or more comfortable with beta versions, or does it > matter, dependant on the circumstances? >
Depends on the program, enormously. Or, to put it another way, depends on whether I'm trying to "just get the job done" or am prepared to put in some effort. I run a web and mail and etcetera server. For that, I use Apache, bind9, courier-imap, and a bunch of other programs, all obtained through apt-get. I also am the author of a MUD client, written in Pike. Because of the nature of what I'm doing there, I tend to push the boundaries of the language itself; that means I sometimes find bugs, submit patches, and all that. So currently, I'm running a bleeding-edge Pike that consists of the latest from upstream plus one patch of my own that hasn't yet been accepted... so it's "from __future__ import socket_nodelay" if you like. The price I pay for that is that, sometimes, stuff's broken. I try to import the bittorrent client and boom, it fails because something's half way through being edited in the SSL code and it wouldn't load. That's something I choose to accept with Pike, but I would *not* accept it with, say, gcc. With the C compiler, I expect it to just work. But alpha and beta versions? Almost never. I'm currently running Python 3.4.0b2 on Windows, because I don't have facilities to build Python from source on Windows; on my Linux boxes, I use Python 3.x straight from Mercurial (same as with Pike above), or else whatever I can apt-get. Either I'm prepared to use a development version or I'm not, with very VERY few exceptions (I think I once built a Linux kernel from a development tarball - really no point, I could have done just as well going from git). Ultimately, it comes down to how much work you want to do versus how much trust you want to place in someone else. If you'd rather trust someone else, take a published stable version (especially one that you can get from a stable OS distribution's repository - not only is it convenient to apt-get everything, you can be confident that the Debian Wheezy repo has stuff that's known to work with Debian Wheezy); if you'd rather do the work yourself, build from source, at whatever point you like. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
