Sean Schofield wrote:
I think we all have somewhat similar positions then. The milestone
builds are not official releases and therefore aren't subject to the
TCK. My position would be that we do not announce them other then
updating a wiki or a webpage that lists the version and its status as
an "alpha" or "beta" build.
I would prefer to just label interim releases as "M1", "M2", "M3" etc.
The wiki could be used by people to note any issues they find with that
particular milestone release, so others can see whether that milestone
is going to be usable for them or not. The notes would generally be
links to relevant significant JIRA issues.
I'm not suggesting that myfaces developers should comb through
outstanding issues and put links to them from each milestone release;
the notes would just be casual, befitting non-official milestones, and
hopefully mostly maintained by JSF users.
A milestone release could even be just a nightly build renamed (or maybe
not even renamed). They would be created whenever people feel that (a)
there has been significant progress from the last milestone in new
features or bugfixes and (b) the code seems to be fairly stable.
Rather than using "alpha"/"beta" as some kind of rough "quality"
measurement, I think the proposed list of known issues is better. A
quick scan of the wiki entries next to that milestone will show whether
the milestone is usable *for a particular purpose* (eg broken
t:dataTable may be a showstopper for some people and irrelevant to
others). That's info a "rating" can't convey.
Also, to me, "alpha" is a release whose API is not frozen while "beta"
implies that the API is frozen. I don't think this is relevant for
myfaces: the javax.faces api is *always* frozen, while the tomahawk api
is likely to be in flux until quite near the release date.
Also, I would suggest that we follow the Struts procedure and
eventually vote one of these milestone builds to be an official GA
release (we would subject it to TCK before then.)
+1
Having milestone releases available means a larger user community will
be using them, and therefore there's more confidence that all
showstoppers are known. It would be great to be able to promote "M99" to
"RC1" to "1.x" in the knowledge that it is actually in real use out in
the world.
Cheers,
Simon
