Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> On tis, 2011-09-06 at 11:41 -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> I think the alphas have been extremely valuable for testing.
> That's not my recollection. Obviously, it's hard to measure this one
> way or the other, but I don't recall there being a lot of test reports
> from people who are not already contributors and could have used some
> other way to get the code.
Presumably the people an alpha release would serve are those who aren't
in a position to build the code from source; since those who are can use
a nightly snapshot or just build from a git pull. So the question is
how big an audience is interested in testing alpha-grade code but do not
have build infrastructure. I would agree that that's a small fraction
on the Unix side of the fence, but I'm a lot less convinced that there's
no market for it among Windows users.
Of course, this means that just building a source tarball marked
"alpha1" isn't real useful. If we're going to do alpha releases, we
have to have buy-in from packagers (or at least from the Windows
installer team) to do follow-on package wrapping.
Josh asked about what was the download count for the alpha installers.
I don't think that's a relevant statistic; the number of people willing
to test alphas is certainly going to be small. What matters is the
value of test reports we get back from them. I'm not sure that we have
that information; people may specify that they're testing alphaN, but
they tend not to say whether they got an installer or built it
themselves.
regards, tom lane