uoting Nicu Buculei <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Louis Suarez-Potts wrote:
another example of people feed-up with long release cycles: downloads for our beta/devel builds have exceeded the downloads for stable builds, this is because people are hungry for new features
Hm. Not really sure where to go with your post, Nicu, you phrase it so tendentiously. We have done an excellent job of, for starters, advertising 2.0beta and deprecating 1.1.4. We want people to use 2.0beta, for we want people to test it and tell us where it breaks, so that we can make it that much better. 2.0 is the future and it's pretty close. In contrast, we are not encouraging people to use the stable build. To then imply that it is a kind of failure that we are succeeding is... bizarre.
Once 2.0 is final, there will still be a developer build. I doubt very much--history is my guide--that the developer build will prove more popular than the stable build, even if we revert, as we very well might, to advertising it on the homepage.
Just after a major release people are very little interested by developer builds, those are very similar with the stable one. With time passing, new features accumulate in the development branch, so those builds become more appealing. At some point in time the new features threshold reach a level where a class of users will just ignore the stability of stable branch and go with developer builds for certain features and another class is fearing to move to the "unstable" version but are anxiously awaiting for the new features. Having shorter release cycles will satisfy those classes of users and also help development because the new code get faster into wide use and testing.
-- nicu my OpenOffice.org pages: http://ooo.nicubunu.ro
Yes this seems to be the general behavior. Usually developers are people that just want to implement a feature that they need on their software. Everyone started as a end-user at some point.
-- Alexandro Colorado Co-Leader of OpenOffice.org Spanish http://es.openoffice.org/
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