I think this should be done because a lot of the issues here have always been solved by “Use nightlies”. Now yes, this isn’t a good idea in the long-run, but for this period where nightlies are often the better version to use.
My main gripe is that a user who just clicks on big buttons won’t notice the nightlies link, and sadly I’ve noticed a lot of reviewers or generally new users have this habit (and admittedly me too a couple of years ago).
And I get it, putting the nightlies link between links is good if you want to keep novice users from having an “unstable” experience. But as I said, this isn’t that much true at this point of time from my point of view.
Well, fortunately this time around, the nightlies are not so radically diverged from the last release. There have been a lot of bugs fixed and other stabilizations, but at least until this past month, all software available on the nightlies was also available on the beta, including WebPositive updates. At least for the “average reviewer” who just installs in a VM, the experience on beta2 is not radically different from a beta1 as it was last month, only incrementally so.
This was indeed different for the long space between R1/alpha4 and R1/beta1, at which point the nightlies had a package manager, better browser, etc. But at least going forward, I don’t see a reason to tout the nightlies more, even if we don’t meet our “release yearly” target.
3 Likes
This is on purpose: it reminds us to release beta versions more often. We’re still gearing up in the process, but we went from 6 years between alpha 4 and beta 1 to 1.5 years between beta 1 and beta 2 (so that’s 4 times better). The goal is currently about a release every year, but we may eventually consider an even shorter cycle once we have all the tooling and procedures in place.
5 Likes