Alpha Announcement

[John J. McDonough]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>
To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 2:49 PM
Subject: Re: Alpha Announcement


> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 01:12:35PM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul W. Frields"
>> <stickster at gmail.com>
>> To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
>> Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 9:39 AM
>> Subject: Re: Alpha Announcement
>>
>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 08:58:08AM -0400, Eric Christensen wrote:
>>>> I've taken the Alpha announcement from F10 and morphed it[1] for F12.
>>>> Please take a look at it and see what you can update.  This should be
>>>> completed by COB tomorrow (Friday).
>>>>
>>>> [1]
>>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Announcement_for_F12_Alpha_Release
>>>
>>> Keeping in mind that our previous Alpha releases ("Can we successfully
>>> compose it?") were somewhat different than the current Alpha ("Should
>>> be generally testable"), the content of this announcement may need to
>>> change somewhat.  Here's the F11 Beta announcement for comparison:
>>>
>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_Beta_Announcement
>>>
>>> Note the new Alpha is something more like previous Beta, and the new
>>> Beta coming next month is more like previous Preview Release.
>>
>> I was thinking the same thing.  (Just getting caught up after broken
>> email). It is probably worth mentioning something like we have always
>> said rawhide is known to eat babies, with this new strategy we probably
>> don't know whether alpha will be more or less voracious.
>
> The idea should be "less voracious than pre-Alpha Rawhide, or the
> level of voracity in F11 Alpha."  Alpha in Fedora now means
> essentially the same as industry-wide, in our case "feature-complete
> and testable."  That means that Alpha is publicly testable, not by
> just an anointed few.  Beta should now mean "code-complete and
> (hopefully) as bug-free as possible."  We all know that bugs happen,
> but Beta should be as close to a final release as humanly possible.
>

Yes, my first thought is that this should be a lot better than previous 
alphas.

But then I thought .... hmmmm, we've never actually done this before, so 
from that perspective, it's even riskier than before ;-)

But I think we probably should speak to this whole idea of trying to make 
our alpha and beta a little more like the rest of the world.  Most people 
would probably expect this alpha to be like the previous ones, and it really 
isn't.  Whether that would make it more attractive or not, well, it would 
make it more attractive to ME, but sometimes I'm surprised at how people 
view some things.

--McD