Hi Hen, well done to get the ball rolling. More below. > -----Original Message----- > From: Henri Yandell [mailto:flame...@gmail.com] > Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2010 14:08 > To: Commons Developers List > Subject: [LANG][COLLECTIONS] Beta releases > > Possibly a query for IO too if it's 2.0 has large changes. > > Given the large API changes in Lang 3.0 and Collections 4.0, a beta > release seems like a very useful thing (kudos to pbenedict for > convincing of me that months ago on IM :) ). > > I'm interested in what advice and thoughts people might have on the > subject. Areas I can think of are: > > 1) versioning, does JIRA identify the version as 3.0-beta1; or just > have a 3.0 and treat the beta as an invisible release? I'm preferring > the latter.
I think there is also "nightly-build" available. If bugs are logged against "3.0" and fixed in "3.0", then the understanding is that the bug was fixed in the alpha/beta/RC cycle. It seems fine if a little mysterious though. +0. > 2) Maven - does the beta go to the main Maven repo, or just tell > people to pull from snapshot (and make sure there are current > snapshots in the snapshot repo)? I'm thinking the latter. +1 > 3) Announcements - blogging, announce@ type announcements presumably. +1. Same as for a release I would think since we are talking about important changes and asking for feedback. A broad audience is required. > 4) Length of time spent in beta. I think we should define this up > front. +1. At least 1 month? I would also like to see at least 1 week pre-beta warning to allow interested committers to put this on their radar and contribute before the beta goes out. > > The intent would be to get early adopters using and finding bugs, but > more importantly drive conversation around the API changes and suggest > new ones. I want us to be able to change an API without having to say > "Yeah, that was dumb - sadly we have to wait 'til 5.0". That sounds like a good intention, IMO this means at least 2 betas, 1) ask for feedback, 2) provide new alpha/beta with feedback changes. Tangent: If we are talking about changing APIs, shouldn't these really be called Alphas and leave a Beta out for a stable API and bug finding only? The drawback is that it might harder to get interest from a wide audience on more than one pre-release version. > > I think both Lang and Collections are ready to have a beta release > asap - once some level of documentation is created, both proto release > documentation and something to define the beta testing period. See above. Gary > > Any thoughts are much appreciated, > > Hen > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
