[haiku-development] Re: Request for vote for next release naming
- From: Stephan Aßmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 11:08:02 +0100
Hi,
On 11.02.2014 09:38, Axel Dörfler wrote:
On February 11, 2014 at 2:17 AM looncraz <looncraz@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If there is a another alpha, I'd called it the "Final Alpha."
Haiku R1 Final Alpha.1 :-)
Hehe, I was thinking the same thing!
It doesn't make sense to label a release beta just because people want that to
happen. If that would be our aim, we would call it R1, and be done with it.
"beta" has a specific meaning in software development, and I don't see any
reason why we would change that. Sure, a beta would be nice and all, but it's
not the word "beta" that makes the difference, but being feature complete.
What I observe is that we shift around the problem. The initial question
is "should we call it alpha or beta". That is shifted to "are we feature
complete or not" and that gets shifted to "what is the exact list of
features we want in the final release". I can see where this is going
next: "what is a missing feature and what is just a bug", see below:
Just to repeat Ingo, I'd say we should determine *exactly* what we want to be in
the release that isn't there yet.
IMAP is not a good point, as we do have IMAP support -- it's just buggy (so
"beta" ready) :-)
I tend to disagree. You could phrase a feature "IMAP" and say it's
included in Haiku, but it doesn't do everything we want. The same holds
true for package management. It is included in Haiku now, it just
doesn't do all the things we want. So you go down one level and define a
feature like "support system upgrades".
But if you step away a bit, you may realize that this never ends,
because there is no definition of how "broad" a feature needs to be
defined. Once someone implements support for system upgrades, it may
still not work completely satisfactory, you could define that in terms
of bugs or missing features...
So in the end, the discussion shifts from "what is the meaning of
'beta'" to "what is a missing feature versus what is a bug". I think
this is neither helpful, nor are we capable as an open source community
to define such an "exact list" of missing features. This may work on the
scale of a single application, maybe even easier so when there are
individuals with roles like "product manager" which have the final say.
But I don't see how we could do this.
Maybe if we define only very broad features, like "IMAP" or "PM" (i.e.
the exact opposite of what Ingo proposes), we could come to a meaningful
conclusion whether or not we can call the next release a beta - on those
terms. Is there any such "big" feature still missing? Reading through
the list at https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/FutureHaikuFeatures , I think
the "features" are on various levels of "broadness".
But I don't see any broad/big feature missing. So why not call it "Beta"?
Best regards,
-Stephan
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