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."
-dg
--
David Gould daveg@sonic.net
If simplicity worked, the world would be overrun with insects.