Should we do a alpha2 now?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 17:47 -0500, simo wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 09:28 +1100, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > 
> > That could work, but the point I see in a release is in helping people
> > find working snapshots, not just snapshots.
> 
> Yes, I said marked working snapshots. The auto snapshotting is just a
> convenience, when you are close to a state like this one, you can
> inspect the most recent snapshot and decide to mark it as good and make
> a quick snapshot release.
> 
> The problem I have with calling alpha2 (or 1 or 3) the current code is
> that some of it is basically stable quality code, much higher than
> alpha, and some of it (if we keep targeting a full featured CIFS and
> logon server) simply does not exist (see printing code).
> 
> So I am un-comfortable with calling it alpha or beta or any classic
> attribute of code that is considered feature complete and just need
> polishing for shipping.

Well, the time for that complaint was when we first listed the features
of an alpha, quite some time ago.  I don't think, having made alpha
releases, that we should start going back to 'tpX'...

> >   For the past while, the
> > tree has often not built for a good portion of the day.  I'm not happy
> > about that, but I also see particular value in marking some stable
> > points along the way, if only for external impressions (which do
> > matter,
> > even if we hoped they would not).
> 
> Indeed make sense, but these seem more suited to "lightweight" releases,
> without the fanfare of an alpha IMO.

Given the situation, I think we need all the fanfare we can get.
Naturally we actually need developers, both on and off the team, to have
time and interest in Samba4, but if I can't get that, I'll take a little
press ;-)

> > Finally, I'm writing up an article for a magazine, and it's becoming
> > obvious that pointing users to the unknown future (in particular if
> > the
> > python code changes the provision process) for a howto section just
> > won't fly. 
> 
> Sure, but does that warrant an "alpha" release?
> You can also simply point to samba4-alpha-20071212.tar.gz release and
> accomplish exactly the same goal.

I would rather make the release.  It's not like Samba4 takes the long
and involved process that Samba 3.2.0 seems to be under to get the
release out.  It takes about a week, end to end, most of which is spent
in valuable debugging of issues found outside the testsuite. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett
http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Red Hat Inc.
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