[Qgis-developer] backports for 1.7.3

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

Sorry for jumping in the discussion here without all the background. Maybe 
this has been discussed before by the qgis dev team (if that's the case, 
disregard what follows), but why not considering beta and RC stages, before 
declaring an official release ? Lots of projects do that, manily in the hope of 
avoiding that a last minute bug doesn't go into the release. I'm well aware 
that this doesn't address all the issues, and also requires additional 
ressource and delay.

I can give you some feedback on how GDAL manages the release process. For 
"major" releases (any change of X or Y in a X.Y.Z numbering scheme), we 
generally do 2 betas and as many RC as needed. For micro releases (change in 
Z), the beta stage is skeeped to go directly to RC. For GDAL, it does not 
involve too much effort (*) as we only release source code. For QGIS that also 
delivers binary packages, that would require significant effort, so perhaps only 
the official release could come with the binary packages. For betas and RCs, 
power users would have to use latest nighty builds or compile by themselves.

Just my 2 cents,

Best regards,

Even

(*) FrankW who manages most of the releases could legitimately object to that 
statement ;-)