Beta and Stable

[Daniel Robitaille]

> >It works like this. Sometime before the final release, a feature freeze
> >is hit, which means after that they only work on bugs.
> >
> >OO.org2 Beta is quite stable, don't worry ;P
> >
> >~Chris
> >
> Oh, I know.  But the principle is still there.  And it is not just
> OpenOffice, granted 1.9.xxx is not as good at the spellcheck in
> 2.0stable, there are other softwares that are 'unstable/beta'

but then you ship Breezy with OOo 1.1.5, and many more people would
have been unhappy.   If 1.9.xxx would have been very unstable, it
wouldn't have made it to Breezy final and the Ubuntu developpers would
have downgraded the package to a previous version.

This happened just before Warty was released last fall.  Until shortly
before the final release, Firefox 1.0.x was in Warty.  But it was
found to be very unstable for some users, so a last minute downgrade
was performed and Warty shipped with Firefox 0.9.x, and Firefox 1.0.x
only made it into hoary 6 months later.

That's why we have 6 months between releases, and why some people
spend that 6 months testing these packages on a daily basis:   to make
sure they are not unstable, even with a "beta" label.


--
Daniel Robitaille