[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change

[Aahz]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2002, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> [Aahz]
>> Skip's already answered with half of my point.  The other half that's
>> critical to this is making it easy and comfortable to try out dev
>> releases and promoting this through the community.  We want to encourage
>> people to do this, and in my time on python-dev (plus more time on
>> c.l.py), I have seen little attempt to directly address this.
> 
> What's a dev release?  An alpha or beta, I presume.  Under that
> definition, every single dev release gets promoted in the community
> with a posting in c.l.py and c.l.py.announce, a webpage, a Windows
> installer, and so on.  What more do we need?

Two points:

* First of all, we've been a bit sloppy in using "dev release" to mean
different things at different points in the discussion.  Here, I'm using
it the way Skip has been using it recently, to refer to packaged micro
releases.

* As I've said in other posts, what we're really looking for isn't so
much people to download these releases as people to *use* these
releases.  That means they need to at least feel comfortable submitting
bug reports and preferably also feel comfortable creating context diffs
and stuff like that.  We want to create an environment that eases people
like me into this process.  We're starting to go in that direction with
the Developer's Guide, but I want to keep focused on it.

For example, I still can't submit bug reports because Lynx is broken WRT
SourceForge, and I haven't yet made the concentrated time it'll take to
track down the problem.  Granted, this specific issue is somewhat unusual, 
but I don't think this *type* of problem getting started is unusual.
-- 
Aahz (aahz@pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"There are times when effort is important and necessary, but this should
not be taken as any kind of moral imperative."  --jdecker