Buyer Beware: A Major Change in NFS is about to happen

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Sep 30 17:00:12 UTC 2009


Jesse Keating wrote:
> People with cargo cult knowledge knew what they meant but not new
> contributers nor community users. The change was for the better as it
> more clearly defines the milestones.

So "clearly" that many feature owners are confused about what they mean?

And don't forget that development snapshots are primarily for developers (in 
fact many projects use "developER release" as synonymous to "developMENT 
release"), so it's important that THEY are familiar with the terms.

> Any change is going to cause some confusion with those who are used to the
> previous state but to change t again would just be worse. In no time
> you'll be used to the change and rail against any fruther change.

I don't think we've reached that point at all. I think justifying the change 
post-facto as a one-time change for the shorter F12 cycle (even though that 
wasn't the plan) and changing back to the tried and true terminology from 
F11 for F13 would not leave many people confused.

And worst case, in the unlikely event people already got used to the terms 
from F12, the worst that could happen after reverting to the previous terms 
is that they would deliver F13 features one milestone TOO EARLY. That would 
actually be a good thing. ;-)

So really, I see no practical argument against switching back to the 
Alpha/Beta/Preview naming (and reintroducing the old Alpha – again, as 
useless as it was in practice, the psychological impact on developers 
shouldn't be underestimated).

        Kevin Kofler




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