From: "J C Lawrence" <claw@kanga.nu>

On Thu, 30 Dec 1999 08:46:36 -0800 alex wetmore <alex@phred.org> wrote:

...

When is 1.2 coming out? This is a production machine, so I am not interested in running beta software.

"Release" and "beta" don't really mean as much for Open Source projects as they do for commercial. The line between them tends to be both fuzzy and often missing. I have the same concerns for production environments so I do the old standard: run a second parallel machine with any new software for a while before rolling it into production.

This depends on how the project is run. I am running FreeBSD on this machine (also open source) and can generally be assured that the -stable builds have been well tested and are suitable for use on a production machine.

At that point the lines between "CVS copy", "beta" and "release" become non-existant.

In FreeBSD terms I would think of "CVS copy" as being -current, "beta" as being -snapshot, and "release" as being -release or -stable. For this machine I would prefer to run builds which are -release or -stable quality. It was my assumption that the 1.0, 1.1, and upcoming 1.2 releases of mailman would be the equivelent of this.

If I take a random CVS copy of your tree then I have no assurances that I didn't take the snapshot just after a large destablizing checkin took place. One can get this information if they choose to hang out on developer mailing lists, but doing so for each of the open source projects that one uses would become a fulltime job (and I already have one of those).

So I will ask again: when is 1.2 (or the next stable code snapshot) coming out?

alex