Hi Bill,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on release announcements.
I agree that making RC releases earlier (and more often in the work
cycle) makes sense. Also that having ~15% of the active user base
trying out the RC is more than we need.
Probably most of those testing our RCs find out about them by my
announcements on <wsjt-devel> or <wsjtgroup>, rather than by comping
across them on the WSJT Home Page -- so maybe it will be better to
simply provide a direct download link in the announcement, rather than
sending them to the WSJT web site.
Then we'd have only GA releases appearing on the WSJT web site, right?
-- Joe
On 12/9/2015 11:14 AM, Bill Somerville wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I would like to propose a small change in the precedence given to WSJT-X
> release announcements. Currently we give almost equal weight to release
> candidate (beta) releases and general availability (GA) full releases. I
> would like to reduce the weighting given to RC releases for example not
> updating the project web-site and simply making an announcement on the
> lists along with a link to the SourceForge files area where the releases
> can be downloaded.
>
> At present we get ~15% of the active user base trying out the RC
> releases so I think there is enough desire from early adopters to try
> the latest stable version as soon as it is available, however we release
> it. These numbers are most welcome but perhaps a bit higher than is
> normally practise for candidate releases. Also many that do take one of
> the RC releases never upgrade to the GA release when it is announced.
>
> The reason for my proposal is to try and make RC releases earlier and
> more often in the work cycle. This may help to combat the constant
> "private" binary distribution that causes considerable distraction with
> support requests from issues that are related to code that is not yet
> release quality and sometimes not even correctly built. The unauthorized
> distributions also have an impact on the perceived quality and level of
> support of the application, especially in this age of social networking
> where news travels fast and wide often without context and with
> inaccurate conclusions.
>
> Making earlier and more frequent RC releases may also help with keeping
> documentation and other processes up to date rather than causing large
> amounts of input being needed on the critical path from developers just
> before a GA release.
>
> Comments?
>
> 73
> Bill
> G4WJS.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> _______________________________________________
> wsjt-devel mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
wsjt-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
