[Qgis-developer] Post-release period of portable commits only?

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Jonathan,

On Mon, 24. Feb 2014 at 14:17:44 +0000, Jonathan Moules wrote:
> > Why not?  We're talking about a feature freezed period!?  The nightly build
> > is a snapshot what what will get release.  Where do you see a difference?

> I think it's a perception thing.
> "Nightly build" in my mind always means "bleeding edge may or may not work,
> use at own risk." I'm aware that doesn't always mean "*it will crash your
> computer, burn down your house, and spend your life savings on questionable
> drugs*", but it's certainly not what I see as a synonym for "stable" either.

Sure, but that doesn't change that it's a misperception.

It more like "This is what we're going to release soon - it's not too bad and
it's getting better every day, but if you don't try it and report problems,
it's your responsibility if the release later eats your kids". ;)
 
> Every time I see a nightly, it always comes with a big scary caveat (QGIS
> does too - http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/alldownloads.html ). This
> trains users not to use them. Taking one of the nightlies and re-branding it
> to something more amicable would get more folks to test it. Just copy and
> paste it and rename the file. :-)

Or just remove all those wimpy warnings.  It's in the smallprint (GPL) anyway.
The users can not tests all they want, we still can't even be made responsible
if the release does not eat kids. ;)

Ok, seriously, I should probably emphasize in the freeze announcement, that
it's mainly the users that are supposed to test the daily prereleases and
weekly release candidates and report problems, while the developers work on
reproducing and fixing already known or newly reported bugs.

And the warnings on the download page should be changed to say, that testing
nightly builds in the development phase are different thing than the daily
prereleases in the freeze phase.


Jürgen

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