Hey everyone, I happened to notice a link in the community page this morning: http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/R1Alpha5
(And here’s the other parts of the thread: https://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/R1Alpha5,1 https://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/R1Alpha5,2 ).
While Alpha 5 isn’t the long hoped-for R1/Beta1 release, this actually would be a good compromise (and a big step forward from Alpha 4!) Is this actually happening, or merely speculating an alternate plan? And if it did happen, great – as the download page and every page outside of Haiku could finally be updated past A4, and visibly show the world the project lives. But, how would this decision affect plans for the R1 roadmap overall? That’d be the second question, really.
Another idea, since alpha/beta are both possibilities, why not adopt a Rapid Release model? Such as Chrome, Firefox, etc. Or something like Debian testing/unstable or Windows’ insider program? Maybe that’s something left to the mailing lists to discuss, but it’s just an idea. The positive thing would be that it would combine Nightlies and the ‘stable’ alphas in one piece as the project moved forward. Users could simply grab copies as they needed them, and the system could have an Auto-updater built in to bring people up to date on the latest copy. Of course, one downside would be that several features would remain experimental, amongst others.
Anyway, it would be intriguing to see what everyone thinks about the release model(s). Personally, I think Alpha 5 would be a good plan to slowly move forward (although Beta 1 would be righteous.) 