Proposal: Longer Testing Cycle

[Ben Gamari]

"Harry ." <voldermort at hotmail.com> writes:

> "Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.0.1, release candidate 1" was recently
> announced, with a caveat that "This release candidate in particular is
> known to suffer from a few significant issues which are being actively
> worked upon ... In the coming weeks we will continue to iterate on
> these issues. We will also look at Trac tickets marked with "highest"
> priority on the release status page."
>
> This leads me to wonder whether release management know what the words
> "release" and "candidate" mean!
>
> I would like to propose that the builds which are currently branded
> "release candidate" be rebranded as "beta", seeing as that is what
> they actually are. When the release manager has a build which s/he
> feels is ready for release, it should be published as a release
> candidate. If after a couple of weeks or so the same build is still
> considered suitable for release, it can be released as is, otherwise a
> new release candidate and testing period are required.
>
Indeed we do use these words very loosely for reasons that are largely
historical.

I would be open to changing the way we refer to these early "releases"
if the current misuse is causing confusion (although not for 8.0, lest
we spur even more confusion).

I envision we'd probably have one or more "beta" release (beta1, beta2,
...) , followed by hopefully only one "release candidate" (rc1),
followed by the release.

Would this address your concern?

Cheers,

- Ben

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