Among several others, On 8 June 2015 at 13:59, David Gould <daveg@sonic.net> wrote:
I think Alphas are valuable and useful and even more so if they have release notes. For example, some of my clients are capable of fetching sources and building from scratch and filing bug reports and are often interested in particular new features. They even have staging infrastructure that could test new postgres releases with real applications. But they don't do it. They also don't follow -hackers, they don't track git, and they don't have any easy way to tell if if the new feature they are interested in is actually complete and ready to test at any particular time. A lot of features are developed in multiple commits over a period of time and they see no point in testing until at least most of the feature is complete and expected to work. But it is not obvious from outside when that happens for any given feature. For my clients the value of Alpha releases would mainly be the release notes, or some other mark in the sand that says "As of Alpha-3 feature X is included and expected to mostly work."
Wow! I never knew there were all these people out there who would be rushing to help test if only the PG developers released alpha versions. It's funny how they never used to do it when those alphas were done.
I say again: in my experience you don't get useful test reports from people who aren't able or prepared to compile software; what you do get is lots of unrelated and/or unhelpful noise in the mailing list. That may be harsh or unfair or whatever, it's just my experience.
I guess the only thing we can do is see who's right. I'm simply trying to point out that it's not the zero-cost exercise that everyone appears to think that it is.
