To play devil's advocate for a moment, is there anyone who would genuinely be prepared to download and install an alpha release who would not already have downloaded one of the nightlies? I only ask because I assume that
releasing
an alpha is not zero-developer-cost and I don't believe
that
there's a large
number of people who would be happy to install something that's described as being buggy and subject to change but are put off by having to type "configure" and "make".
Further, it seems to me that the number of people who won't roll their own who are useful as bug-finders is even smaller.
I get the feeling that the argument appears to be "Bruce doesn't want to release a beta, Simon wants to release something. Let's release an alpha because it's sort-of half way in between" as a consensus compromise (I'm not deliberately picking on specific people, I'm aware you're not the only two involved and arguing for either side, but you do seem to be fairly polar opposite sides of the argument :) ); I don't really believe that releasing an alpha moves anything further forward from a testing point of view, and I'm fairly sure that it will have just as dele
terious effect on bugfixing as would a beta
, with the added disadvantage of the extra developer cost.