Slashdot Mirror
What constitutes an Alpha-version?
jacobm writes "An article went up on mozillazine.org yesterday in which the Mozilla team asks the community: what will it mean for Mozilla to be alpha? Probably a good question for everyone to think about, especially those of us who develop (or will develop) software for fun or profit. " Interesting question, especially when it comes to Mozilla. With M12 coming up, they are getting close to that stage, and have setup a criteria they think works. Do you agree?
You see, this, as everything, is a question of compromise. Do you want to wait another few years until they can get it absolutely perfect without any outside help, or do you want a pre-release that will be widely circulated so that they can see how the code in its current state stands up to real-world use and abuse, potentially accelerating the bugfixing by several orders of magnitude?
Your comparison with machine shop equipment is bogus. Downtime on such gear is extremely expensive and nearly intolerable. If your browser crashes, you sigh and kick it back up. Nevertheless, I will agree that an hour MTBF is completely unacceptable for a true release. Fortunately, thanks to open source development, it doesn't have to be.
And please, it's "horribly inadequate". Isn't it embarrassing to put glaring spelling mistakes in bold?
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
It'll have developed large areas of silver hair on its back, amass several females in a personal harem, and keep the others in line with displays of violence and aggression, sometimes ritual and sometimes real.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought the question was about what happens when Mozilla becomes an alpha male.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Speaking of Greek, traditionally "alpha" was the designation applied to something that's little past the prototype stage, and sometimes, is nothing more than that. It doesn't refer to the propensity for bugginess, but rather to whether the interface is decided or not. And in the case of alpha, it's not. The interface can change completely in later stages. Parts may be missing. Parts may be added.
In beta, on the other hand, we're done with that. Beta is the stage after which functional changes are forbidden. You can't change the interface in the jump to production. Everything must behave as documented to behave. All you can do is fix bugs. No new features. No change in calling conventions.
I have actually seen "gamma" releases, too. This seems to mean "We hope to God this is production calibre."
After beta--or rarely, after gamma--comes production. Never issue deltas, except in the form of a patch. :-)
Seems to me that the Linux model of devel tree and stable tree is much more appropriate. When Mozilla is ready to start a stable branch (and it's getting fairly close), then I think that's what they should do.
Leave the "alphas" and "betas" to the Netscape Communicator crew.
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page.