Re: [opensuse-testing] Weekly News for July 16

Am Mittwoch, 20. Juli 2011, 11:44:54 schrieb Rob OpenSuSE:

On 19 July 2011 21:20, Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 3:43 PM, Javier Llorente wrote:

...

I prefer the old naming scheme... alpha, beta, RC, release. It's much clear.

Javier,

It may be clear, but it is inaccurate. That is why the change to milestones.

How about:

unstable-1 ... stabilizing-1 ... RC ... Gold

Is "unstable" or "stabilising" any more accurate? The distro doesn't necessarily have a queue of "risky" changes, kernel & desktop environment releases require integration quite late on. Rather than release naming being a logic problem, the issue of encouraging wider testing pre-release via the "beta" conivention is simply about emotional message; to encourage openSUSE users who *could* contribute useful bug reports to give it a spin and do so, rather than waiting till RC1.

We should not waste much time on release numbering & naming conventions, M1 .. MN is workeable. Labelling Alpha, Beta, RC, GM or Final, is more about informing the wider user base. We all know all releases are going to need patching, in a modern networked environment.

As a project, by labelling 12.1 M6 as "Beta", it allows more effective marketing of the pre-release, implicitly it says this should be safe enough for early adopters to run & use, getting a preview of 12.1 final. The bugs found at that point, have a better chance of being fixed (ideally) before the GM, or an entry in Release Notes.

Larry's suggestion might not wildly increase installs of 12.1 M6, but it can't do any harm and disappointments are easier to take in a "beta" than at "RC" stage, and tend to be forgotton if a fix is available for GM or as an update at end of first install..

Personally, I think efforts like factory-tested repo & Tumbleweed, have far more potential to encourage more testers, than fiddling with version numbers & naming :)

Regards Rob

I agree, the numbering is not this important, you could also stick with the build number. We hope that the name "Beta" for a release will draw more attention of potential users. For me it's fun to see, that a naming scheme starts more discussion than some testing issues :) Regards Jürgen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-testing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-testing+help@opensuse.org