I think it is irresponsible to not mitigate risk by having multiple levels of fall-back in place always. Not installing a 3.4 atop a 3.3 is one of those safeguards. It is foolish not to take that precaution. It honors users by allowing them to compare based on *their* use cases and decide when, if ever, to remove a previous version.
For me, it is always appropriate to leave a previous .x release of a productivity product installed. As a matter of policy, I would never silently uninstall anything. That is regardless of the presumed quality of the new release. My intention is to safeguard the user first, no matter what my level of confidence (or hubris) might be. I am not presuming anything about the quality of any non-existent release. I am expressing a principle that does not move our risk of error onto the user if at all possible and practical. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Rob Weir [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 12:11 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: A timeline for an Apache OO release On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: > The releases have to be rebranded anyhow, because they are currently Oracle > branded. I think having it be OpenOffice.org 3.4 and installed over > OpenOffice.org 3.3 is a very risky idea. The quick-release cycle may be great > for our teething; users should not have to suffer any of the consequences. [ ... ] I think it is irresponsible for anyone to make statements about the quality or the suitability for production use of a release they have not yet seen, not installed, and not tested. Let's wait to see a release candidate before we start issuing speculative predictions that have no factual basis. -Rob [ ... ]
