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

[Yurii Rashkovskii]

It's a great idea. If the OTP team also had an ability to expose their 
issue tracking system in some way, it would have been a heavenly 
combination!

On Thursday, November 29, 2012 12:42:30 PM UTC-8, 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.
>
> Regards,
> Björn-Egil
>
>
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