Hi all, What do you think about the idea of publishing pre-release artifacts as part of the RC emails?
For Python this would translate into publishing the same artifacts from RC email with a version like "2.X.0rcY" to pypi. I do not know, but I am guessing we can do a similar thing with Maven central for Java artifacts as well. Advantages would be: - Allow end users to validate RCs for their own purposes using the same exact process they will normally use. - Enable early-adaptors to start using RC releases early on in the release cycle if that is what they would like to do. This will in turn reduce time pressure on some releases. Especially for cases like someone needs a release to be finalized for an upcoming event. There will also be disadvantages, some I could think of: - Users could request support for RC artifacts. Hopefully in the form of feedback for us to improve the release. But it could also be in the form of folks using RC artifacts for production for a long time. - It will add toil to the current release process, there will be one more step for each RC. I think for python this will be a small step but nevertheless it will be additional work. For an example of this, you can take a look at tensorflow releases. For 1.13 there were 3 pre-releases [1]. Ahmet [1] https://pypi.org/project/tensorflow/#history
