On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 5:24 AM, ant elder <[email protected]> wrot > "Do not include any links on the project website that might encourage > non-developers to download and use nightly builds, snapshots, release > candidates, or any other similar package. The only people who are > supposed to know about such packages are the people following the dev > list (or searching its archives) and thus aware of the conditions > placed on the package. If you find that the general public are > downloading such test packages, then remove them.
What problem is this policy supposed to solve? The days of someone downloading a nightly build and being surprised it's not release quality are long gone, if they ever existed. In my mind the point of having nightly builds available is so that someone can check to see if a bug he ran into is fixed in the latest code before filing a bug report, or try out new features before an official release. I guess you could argue that such people are ipso facto "developers" but in that case we come back again to ... what problem does this solve? This really seems like an area that projects should be able to set their own policy guided by common sense. (Is the ASF a place where I can raise questions like this without being shut down with "this is how we do things here, go away if you don't like it?" I guess we will see.) -Jonathan
