Hi Keith -

Keith Hodges wrote:
> Edgar has delivered image after image, but does that help anyone in the
> long run really. It  doesn't help me. I have production code and I don't
> have time to spend a month moving it form one image to another manually,
> without any tools to help, broken MC, broken Universes etc. It doesnt
> help us move forward in the future to something like Morphic 3.0, or COG
> for which atomic loading is likely to be essential.

There is only one way to answer your question: YES!!! It *does* help to 
produce alpha images.

What you have to distinguish here is the need of you personally and the 
need of the community. For this community, an image is a form of 
communication that it is familiar with. For this community, the 
announcement of the availability of a new alpha/beta/gamma image is a 
sign of life, is a documentation of the process that the release team 
goes through.

3.11 has lost *all* visibility to me. I didn't know whether it had even 
started because there was nothing on the server, there were no 
announcements on this list, so how would people know? I didn't know how 
to check in on the progress because 3.11 used Installer scripts - 
something that this community at this point in time is simply not 
familiar with.

Once I found out what to run I spent about half an hour to load all the 
code. At the end of the process Installer blew up on me. Again, having 
an image would have addressed this problem.

So there is *lots* of good reasons to produce alpha images. Hey, and 
given that Installer is automated this shouldn't be a big deal right? 
And someone other than you should be able to do it too, right?

*Please* do realize the value of alpha images as a form of communication 
in this community. If you post a fix for the .gz loading I will happily 
produce an alpha image for people to play with.

Cheers,
   - Andreas