Mark Guzdial wrote:
> 
> I disagree with your proposal, Bruce, because our desired audience
> for Squeak goes well beyond this list.  I think it does work for us
> to say "I'm up to changeset 4891" when describing your image's state,
> but when you're helping someone who isn't quite clear what a
> changeset is or how to find out how far they're updated, it's really
> helpful for them to be able to tell you "I'm running Squeak 2.8."  In
> terms of technical support and helping novices understand what's
> happening, having regular releases is useful.

I agree with Mark on this.  We need to have releases which have easy-to-remember names, such as "3.2", or at worst possibly something like "3.2 patch 1".  Changeset numbers (or snapshot dates) should not be part of an official release name, except when talking about alpha versions.

But I agree with part of what Bruce was saying, I think.

It seems that the recently tried process of splitting off a beta version for awhile hasn't worked that well.  The beta tends to be ignored (e.g. 3.1beta), and a lot of fixes are added to the latest alpha version (e.g. 3.2alpha), since that's what most of the hard-core Squeakers are using.

So, for this 3.2 release it seems that Dan is doing more of a snapshot approach, in which we're freezing the current 3.2alpha for testing for awhile (a week or two?), and then calling it 3.2 if there are no major bugs.  This may work better, since everyone will be using this 3.2gamma, so that major bugs will more likely be flushed out.  (Squeak Central could even split off a 3.3alpha internally to work on enhancements, but this would be hidden from the community during the testing period.)

Still, this is different from doing snapshot releases every couple of months as Bruce was suggesting.  I wouldn't mind doing that also, as long as they're still considered alpha releases.  Maybe every couple of months we could do a mini-snapshot, which could be called 3.3alpha-1, 3.3alpha-2, etc.  Or maybe 3.3alpha-April, 3.3alpha-July, etc.  These would be available on the ftp site, and it might be more convenient to refer to your changeset as working with 3.3alpha-April, since that Squeak snapshot could be easily downloaded.  Then again, it might not be worth the effort since it's not *that* much different from what we're doing now.

There's also the issue of whether we want to support "patches" to major releases, which are not perfect, but are certainly easier for novices to deal with than changeset numbers.  I won't worry about this for now, though. :)

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com