Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Robert Collins]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:12 AM, Rick Spencer
<rick.spencer at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> At UDS I had some "hallway discussions" about why we freeze for Alphas
> and Betas, and the fact that I think it is time to drop this practice
> and rather focus on making Ubuntu good quality each day. Sadly, there
> was no session on this, thus this email to this list for discussion.

+1 in general. One thing that occurs to me, is that I don't know what
the Alpha and Betas are *for* for us.... I mean: in a traditional
software product alpha releases would be used to guage customer
reaction to new features and changes, betas are used to assess
real-world defect rates (and once they drop low enough, general
release can happen).

We have landed substantial changes post-alpha-milestone in the past,
and we probably will continue to do so (e.g. Gnome releases, Unity
etc): so I'm not sure, *other* than defect rates, what Alpha does for
us.

I'm a huge fan of keeping trunk stable and release-quality always,
which makes the beta process still useful, but one that doesn't need
fixed beta releases, just get folk tracking trunk and reporting back.

-Rob