[erlang-questions] Increase quality by tagging release candidates?

[Steve Vinoski]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 11/29/2012 09:42 PM, Björn-Egil Dahlberg wrote:
>
>> Hi there!
>>
>> I'm curious; would pushing and tagging release candidates to GitHub for
>> user testing be worthwhile?
>>
>> We already do this for major-versions, i.e. R14A, R15A and soonish R16A,
>> and we get some useful information from this. I want to encourage people
>> to test our otp HEAD at GitHub when nearing a release. Especially those
>> we say are release-candidates, i.e. R*A-releases. I also think we should
>> start tagging those as release candidates, i.e. R15A-RC1, R15A-RC2, etc,
>> further making the point of a release candidate so we don't have users
>> taking a release candidate for production .. or include it in a distro.
>>
>> Now, should we also do this for maint-releases also? At Erlang/OTP we
>> have *extensive* testing on a multitude of operating systems,
>> architectures and configurations. We can however, always test even more.
>> =)
>>
>> Normally we have "code-freeze" a couple of weeks before a release and
>> then a stabilization phase to iron out, hopefully, the last few glitches.
>>
>> I'm thinking, at code-freeze - push what we have, tag it and notify you
>> via this or other medias that we have a src-state that contains more
>> signal than noise and we wish that you test it against your product and
>> your testcases. Hopefully, you could get information back to us by
>> saying *thumbs up* or more importantly saying "I'm concerned about
>> this behavior here .." if you encounter something worrisome.
>>
>> The window to do changes are small at that point and we would certainly
>> only correct things that are apparent bugs - correcting one thing runs
>> the risk of creating even bigger, unforeseen, problems. Ultimately some
>> sort of risk/reward decision will be taken by us.
>>
>> Is this of intrest? Should we start tagging release-candidates? Would
>> you be interested to test release candidates on your products and let us
>> know problems before a release?
>>
>> I think it would lead to even better product quality.
>>
>
> Me too, for all the reasons you mentioned. Tag when it's code freeze,
> inform people about it, and the concerned citizens will test the code
> against their projects. Everybody wins.


+1, I think this would be good.

--steve
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