[Statcvs-users] Release early and often?

[Richard C. <ri...@cy...>]

Hi all,

Brian's request for a dev snapshot made me think about the StatCVS 
release process.

I tend to release late. New features and bugfixes can sit in the CVS 
for many month before I put together a new release. That's because I 
often feel that the new features need more testing and are not yet 
stable enough. I don't want to release a new version with significant 
new bugs.

But recently I think that this is the wrong strategy. Common wisdom in 
the open source community is to "release early, release often". And 
when people rely on inofficial dev builds because important new 
features and bugfixes are not available in the official release, then 
the process is obviously broken.

So what can I do to improve the release process?

Publish release candidates?

Offer a stable and a beta download?

Just stop worrying about bugs and release without much testing?

Other ideas?

What do you think? How should an open source release process for a 
project like StatCVS work? Both developer's and user's point of views 
are welcome.

Thanks,
Richard