Before we moved to the ASF, the Subversion project had a habit of running our pre-releases on our live repository, and I wonder if there would be benefits to putting the 1.7.0 alphas on svn.apache.org.
The server-side of 1.7.0 has seen several enhancements, but unlike the client, where much of the working copy library was rewritten, the server-side improvements were largely incremental (and in some cases they even replaced harmful "features"). As such, if feels like testing 1.7.0 in the production ASF repository is a minimally risky move, while providing several potential benefits. For the Subversion devs, the benefits of running the alpha series are numerous: * better testing on a large dataset, (with easy access to the admins for better analysis) * enable testing of client-side HTTPv2 in real-world usage * smaller repo size by using revprop packing * general pride of eating our own dogfood There are some drawbacks, however: * frequent alpha releases could keep infra busy upgrading (but turnaround on bugfixes should be fast) * general hazards of running lightly-tested software (corruption, crashes, etc) I don't recall if we ran alphas on svn.collab.net during the 1.5 cycle (we certainly ran RCs) and running the alphas in production might be a bit premature. I'm not yet sure how I personally feel about it, but just wanted to know how others felt, both from the Subversion developer side, as well Infra. -Hyrum
