Multi-Lingual Squeak, Cathedrals, Bazaars and Fallen Cities.

Hannes Hirzel hannes.hirzel.squeaklist at bluewin.ch
Sun Mar 2 22:24:43 UTC 2003


Frank,

Frank Sergeant <frank at canyon-medical.com> wrote:
> I guess my main interest is in the philosophy of these trade offs,
> including the definitions of alpha, beta, gamma.  If it were as simple
> as saying we have two candidate images ready to go: one of which is 3.4g
> with its flaws but many benefits and the other has all the benefits of
> 3.4g but has no bugs and no missing class comments and no remaining
> areas which could benefit from refactoring; then it would be clear which
> image I would be in favor of releasing as 3.4 final.  Of course, the
> trade offs are not so simple (and I am not saying you said they were!).

You are exaggerating. I never was saying that 3.4 must include
all the things you mention.

For me the main question is why is it possible
to roll in with ease a severe bug in an intact system, detecting
it in the gamma stage, having a fix by an expert and then 
saying it is too late to fix because one is in gamma. For me
this is magic thinking. If you label something 'gamma' it must
be 'gamma'. 

I would like to close this discussion from my part.
I see that real efforts are under way to resolve the 
following problem.

The problem is that it is easy to roll in bugs because of not 
enough automated testing. An important part of the test strategy at 
the moment is just have developers and user work with the image. 
For this reason I understand that people do not want to risk having 
a major change in a gamma even if a fix exists done by an expert.
(Andreas Raab)

Establishing a better testing culture within the Squeak community
is now addressed in various ways - most notably the announcement
of Marcus Denker of today.

Thank you for participating in this clarifiying debate.

-- Hannes



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