On 10/03/2012 05:27 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
That's your prerogative as RM of course, but you haven't given any
reason beyond the circular "I don't care about enabling feedback from
people that can't or won't build from source, because people that
can't or won't build from source don't provide useful feedback".
That's not quite what I said. I simply said that the alphas are
largely ignored.
My perspective is that most people ignore the alphas and only get
interested when the software "solidifies". Having more alphas, or
having earlier alphas, doesn't mean we'll have more people
interested in the alphas.
Adding more alphas (as you have previously suggested) adds
additional workload on myself and the rest of the release team--I
don't know what the Mac build is like, but I know Martin has to
intercede manually to coax a Windows installer out of the build.
I'm loathe to burn their time for what I perceive as little return.
Changing an existing alpha to be earlier doesn't alter the workload,
but I fear it makes the alpha less relevant. Evaluating alphas /
betas takes an investment of time, and whether or not a potential
alpha user makes that investment depends on what they expect to get
out of testing the alpha. If they're doing it out of the goodness
of their hearts, just to help Python--well, that's fabulous, and
more / earlier alphas might actually interest them. But my
suspicion is that most people who try the alphas are doing early
integration testing with their own stuff. For those people, the
earlier the alpha, the less interesting it probably is to them.
Earlier means that the software will be less finished. It will be
buggier, it won't have as many features as the beta will. As a
result it won't be as revealing--or as relevant--as a later alpha or
even a beta. If that's their perspective, I suspect they'll be less
likely to try an earlier alpha.
In short, I see the scheduling of alphas as a tradeoff between
"early enough that we'll have time to fix things" and "late enough
that the software is reasonably complete".
What it really comes down to: I'm a first-time RM, and I lack the
courage/wisdom to overrule what appears to be a reasonable status
quo. I feel I don't have to defend the decision to maintain the
status quo; I feel instead you have to make a case for changing it.
So far all I recall seeing from you are assertions. I'd like to see
some harder data.
On 10/03/2012 05:28 PM, Brian Curtin wrote:
The webstats in April 2012 show 5628 downloads of 3.3a1 and 4946
downloads of 3.3a2 Windows installers.
I'd love to know how much feedback we got as a result of these
downloads. Do we have any way of telling?
And out of curiosity, how many 3.3.0 final Windows installers have
been downloaded so far?
On 10/03/2012 05:29 PM, Maciej
Fijalkowski wrote:
How about having nightly builds then?
We simply don't have a fully-automated process to produce installers
for all platforms. In fact, I fear we don't have a fully-automated
process to produce installers for any platforms.
On 10/03/2012 05:40 PM, Paul Moore
wrote:
FWIW, I *will* be downloading and installing the 3.4 alphas as soon as
they come out. How much I'll *use* them depends on what issues I find
with them - but that's the whole point, I'll feed back my experiences.
Excellent, thanks for the data! As long as you're volunteering
interesting data ;-), what platform will you be testing on? And
what is your purpose in downloading the alphas--just Good
Samaritan-ism, or integration testing with software you care about,
or what?
/arry