I can't help noticing a bit of a problem. With a very aggressive release-schedule such as "every 2 weeks", chances of genuine bugs being
1) reported, 2) diagnosed and 3) fixed
in that timeframe are very minimal.
When I say "genuine" I discount typos, apparmor bureacrazy, and other minors that can be dealt with by level 1 support. I've got a couple of open reports (159731, 136742, 159727, 153585), and whilst an aggressive release-schedule is probably a Good Thing(R), it puts a lot of unnecessary strain on testers. For bugs/problems that aren't positively fixed before the next release, it's usually "please install <next release> and see if problem has gone away".
Perhaps I'm just whining or venting some steam, but the aggressive release-schedule isn't doing me much good. There is no aggressive release-schedule. It has always been this way. Only
Am Donnerstag, 20. April 2006 21:01 schrieb Per Jessen: that external testers can see this now, too. But I totally agree with you, that beta testing is a lot of work and having open bugs, sometimes even without comments is not a good thing. Many of the bugfixes you can only test with a fresh install, as you might have done something on your beta, which changes things. So the easiest way is to release betas often. I mean, it's better to install betaN+1 with fixes included, than betaN with additional fixes for testing. I never trust fixes :-) only if the bug has gone with the next release I assume, that it's really fixed. Even then it might come back with the next release. Sometimes a patch does not go in, the developer forgets about it etc. This takes us to another issue: There is also no bugfree distribution (and there will perhaps never be one). So the release depends on the amount of open bugs and the severity of the bugs. -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Marcel Hilzinger Linux New Media AG Süskindstr. 4 D-81929 München Tel: +49 (89) 99 34 11 0 Fax: +49 (89) 99 34 11 99