Re: [Plplot-devel] Are we at the release candidate stage now?

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> I think that advertising the tarballs now as release candidates will have
> the psychological advantage of making users conscious of the proximity of
> the release.  Hence, they will be more willing to download the beast and
> test it. "CVS snapshot" is not as sexy and exciting as "Release Candidate".
>
> I cannot (of course) prove my claim and, since you are the Release Engineer,
> the final word is yours.  I am just afraid that only one week for users
> tests will be too short.

Actually, I agree with your claim that calling it a release candidate will
encourage people to try it more at this early date.  But my opinion is
"release candidate" is a special phrase that implies thorough testing by us,
and I don't want the user's to get that wrong impression and then angrily
flood us with a bunch of similar bug reports about something we should have
caught with our own testing.  I went through that poorly tested scenario
with PLplot-5.2.0, and I don't wish to repeat it if "release candidate"
unfairly raises the expectations of our users.

But that is the essential question here.  Does "release candidate" no longer
have any special meaning to our users since the phrase has been mis-used so
often for other projects?  What do the rest of you think? If there is strong
support amongst the developers here to call what we currently have
(segfaults and all) a release candidate, I would be willing to go along.  Or
maybe there is some compromise wording such as "pre-release candidate" we
would all be happy with?

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________