I believe that a strict QA process actually hurts the quality of OSS projects like Apache. We have a gigantic pool of talented users who would love to give us a hand by testing our latest and greatest in every contorted way imaginable. But we're holding out on them. We're saying that we know better than they do. I don't think we do. Sure, we should be testing our code, but there's absolutely no way that we can be perfect. Closely held ivory-tower QA doesn't scale any better at the ASF than it does at a proprietary company. But the QA that comes out of widely distributed release-candidates _does_ scale. Why don't we let the teeming masses have their fill?
-aaron
On May 7, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
The trouble is that we need to perform *some* sort of quality control out there... The option is as soon as we have a tarball out, it's "immediately" released, in which case why even bother with a test or RC candidate. We need to, IMO, impose some sort of order and process on how we release s/w, and the simple fact that we have RC tarballs out there doesn't cut it.
It's certainly a problem that we've had for some time, especially when you consider the times when releases are really security related... I would hate having some sort of "private" release mailing list where we can really test RC tarballs in a semi secure environment before they are released in general, but I can't see us simply saying our release procedure is we throw a tarball out there and 2-3 days after we do that we "Announce" it :)
Aaron Bannert wrote:
Why is it bad if people download the RC version and test it? Frankly, I really don't mind if slashdot or anyone else broadcasts that we have an RC tarball available. If anything it's a good thing. We don't make any guarantees about our code anyway, so whether or not we call it a GA release is just a courtesy to our users. Sheesh, this just seems like we're turning down would-be beta-testers!
Please put the tarballs back up, and please ignore the press.
-aaron
On May 7, 2004, at 12:28 PM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
I have made the tarballs unavailable from the below URL. People should contact me directly to obtain the correct URL...
Sander Temme wrote:
On May 7, 2004, at 8:15 AM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
Via:
http://httpd.apache.org/dev/dist/
I'd like to announce and release the 11th.
Except Slashdot beat you to the punch: <http://apache.slashdot.org/>.
-- ======================================================================= ====
Jim Jagielski [|] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [|] http://www.jaguNET.com/
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order
will lose both and deserve neither" - T.Jefferson
