bzr 1.4rc2 coming; and more beta testing

[Martin Pool]

bzr 1.4 is scheduled for release today.  As we have found some bugs in
testing (which is after all the point of testing) I propose to do
another rc today or on the weekend, and the final release next week.

There are patches for two of them up on the list now: one from Robert
(reviewed by John) that restores a cache, removal of which caused knit
repositories to slow down noticeably in 1.4.  The other is from
Andrew, is not yet reviewed, and deals with bug 217701, also problems
pulling from knits into packs.

....

More generally: we're doing a lot of work in the network and
repository code, for performance generally and to support streaming
push and stacked repositories.  Our test suite is a big asset in
making these changes but we still need beta testing to catch some bugs
that come up in particular interactions or environments.  For the
phase we're in now, I think we need a bit more beta testing than
usual.  More testing of release candidates is always welcome.

One thing we can do beyond that is set up daily builds into a PPA (and
also for other platforms) to make it easier for active users to help
us pick up problems before we get close to a release.  I will try to
look at that next week.

We could try making the release candidate a longer time before the
release, but I'm not sure that would expose the same code to more
people.  Generally, we need seem to detect most regressions or serious
bugs within the first few days of testing, but it can take a little
longer to fix them.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>