It's not about the 5 minutes of compile time, it's about the signalling.
Just *when* is git ready for testing? You don't know from the outside.
I do lurk here a lot and still am unsure quite often.
Even simply releasing an alpha *tarball* would be useful enough. What is needed is the signal to test, rather than a fully-built package.
I can see that, and can absolutely get behind the idea of a nightly being flagged as an alpha, since it should involve next to no developer time.
Nightly where? This is an international community.
The tip of the master branch is the current "alpha" - so the question is whether a tar bundle should be provided instead of asking people to simply keep their Git clone up-to-date. These both have the flaw of excluding people who would test the application if it could simply be installed like any other package on their system. But I'm not seeing where there would be a huge group of people who would test an automatically generated source tar-ball but would not be willing to use Git. Or are we talking about a non-source tar-ball?
Maybe packagers could be convinced to bundle up the master branch on a monthly basis and simply call it Master-SNAPSHOT. No alpha, no beta, no version number. I've never packaged before so I don't know but while the project should encourage this as things currently standard the core project is doing its job by ensuring that the tip of master is always in a usable state.
Or, whenever a new patch release goes out packagers can also bundle up the current master at the same time.
