In <200903241233.34901.rmatov101@charter.net>, Rajko M. wrote:
On Tuesday 24 March 2009 11:26:36 am Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
Being not part of an official release makes the software release-candidate at best. Normally unreleased software is beta or worse quality.
There is a lot of software that is not included in official distro, but it is good software. Man-hour constrains make impossible to include them. Software included in Education project is perfect example.
I'm not saying the software isn't good. I'm saying that it hasn't gotten the level of attention required to make release-quality software. The reason why is not relevant to the argument.[1] If you install anything from outside the official repositories, you should consider yourself an alpha/beta tester for the unit "that software on your distribution" even if the unit "that software" is considered release-quality by the project that develops it.
Also, lack of support *is* something that lowers the quality of software, usually to beta-quality or lower.
That can be your internal way to simplify thinking about quality, but again Beta is used to describe development stage, ie. code quality,
Beta is a beyond flexible term these days. However, it has always included more than just the state of the source code. Beta is a state of the product as a whole, particularly the expected user experience, which includes the level of support users will receive. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/