Re: Duration of beta period

Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop(at)range(dot)infoplease(dot)com> writes:
> And the fact of the matter is, if the goal is to expand testing, which
> was what I was trying to comment on, you probably get alot of mileage in
> expanding that testing by making packages easy, RPMs, BSD packages,
> solaris packages , whatever.

I agree with Karl on this point --- people who want nonstandard
installations are obviously not going to be able to use such packages,
but it doesn't hurt them any if we provide 'em. Seems like making
the usual package formats available would garner enough extra
testing to be worth the relatively small effort involved.

Of course, not being one of the people who make up these packages,
that's easy for me to say ;-). Perhaps I'm wrong in guessing that
the extra effort is small.

This still begs the question of *when* to put out such snapshots.
Picking a reasonable time during the development cycle to capture
a snapshot, and then building derived packages to go with the source
tarball, is looking more and more like a mini-release --- especially
since we'd probably have to attach identifying numbers to the things,
if we want helpful bug reports. Do we have the energy to do any of
this? How will we organize it?

regards, tom lane