Hi everyone,
Until we have more developers, let's stick to one public release per year, at least for Etoys 5. Remember, we cannot rely on Bert, Yoshiki, and Scott after New Year's.
As for developer releases, we can be more regular ... and we can encourage people to use alpha/beta releases, which will help with our testing.
To get into a regular rhythm, let's do installer builds on the first of each month, if there's enough change to warrant it (decided at dev meet).
We could call the developer builds .... Etoys 5 alpha 1, Etoys 5 alpha 2, etc, or 5a1, 5a2. When we reach "brave user" level stability, we switch to Etoys 5 beta 1, etc, or 5b1.
In other words .... to the community, alpha means "risky, you will find bugs", beta means "please test personally" .... final means, "use in your classrooms."
Here's a potential release cycle:
Dec 1st ... Etoys 5 alpha 1 ... includes Dr Geo, with update stream & build on skylab
Jan 1st ... Etoys 5 alpha 2 ... riskiest changes first
Feb 1st ... Etoys 5 alpha 3 ... debatable UI changes
Mar 1st ... Etoys 5 alpha 4 ... last iffy build
Apr 1st ... Etoys 5 beta 1 ... community review of UI and new features
May 1st ... Etoys 5 beta 2 ... includes community suggestions
June 1st ... Etoys 5 release candidate ... code freeze
June 21st ... Etoys 5 final ... nothing but criticals and blockers
This means we need to "get the hood down" partially for the first four releases, and completely for the next three.
Thoughts?
Tim