As a way to get more user feedback on our major feature releases, what does everyone think about releasing one or two -beta releases for each major feature release?
This might fall in line with some of the stated concerns about our release schedule (see [1]). I've stated a desire to be quicker about our releases (my vote was 4 months). I've also been saying quite publicly that we should never release if we know about upgrade issues (that's the cost of having actual users of our project, which I'm more than willing for us to pay). Perhaps -betaX releases would be helpful to get attention from the users to test the release (including upgrade paths). The stated assumption could be: -beta releases are not releases that can be upgraded *from*, but are intended to help support testing by end users that want to check the upcoming release against their expected feature set and upgrade path. I would see the first -beta-1 being released about 1 month after feature freeze. For example, for 4.2.0, it would be on 2013-06-30. I would only do a -beta-2 (or later) beta release if required due to testing results. I would also suggest that the -beta-* releases would *not* have any particular quality criteria (well... perhaps minimal, like blocking on issues that fundamentally make the software unstable). I'm not sure about my own proposal here, but I wanted to throw it out and see if any of you have feedback / thoughts. -chip [1] http://markmail.org/message/3ctdwor5hfbpa3vx
