Thanks for explaining the thinking. However, I am not sure that each release has to include some major new improvement. A quarterly release would be quite OK even if it contained nothing but bug-fixes.
And a quarterly release would make the point that the OS is under active development - something that an annual Beta doesn’t do.
I’d go for a fixed schedule of quarterly releases, each containing the latest proven code. People are using nightlies because they have no idea when the next release is going to be, and they want to get the benefit of the work that has been going on. With a quarterly release they wouldn’t have long to wait.
If it helps, I believe the problem started right after hrev54509 #16492 (Renaming files not working and cursor issues in hrev54513) – Haiku
Only nightly, only real hardware, only hardcore!
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I’m still working on Tracker Edit Name but haven’t fixed it yet. If we get to beta and it’s still not fixed yet I’ll have to revert BTextView to get it working again.
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Only nightly builds on real hardware.
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Me too, nightly builds (x86-64) on real hardware.
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They don’t, the main rule should be that there are no known regressions from the previous version. We don’t want new releases to make things worse.
With the current development model (where everything gets merged to main branch without a lot of testing, our unit tests are never run and largely out of date, etc), this is difficult to achieve. We got into this situation because Haiku was not initially designed to have this many releases, and there is a culture from the developers to keep things that way (it’s simpler for them).
Maybe one thing that could help is having a dedicated “release team”, but I think that would gain acceptance only if it starts from the existing system and then starts improving from it. A “let’s pick and tag some nightly that looks good” system would not get my vote for a variety of reasons, including:
- Currently our beta releases are built with less debugging enabled, which means they are faster than nightlies
- Beta release get some more testing, and in some cases we disable or revert experimental code that doesn’t work
- It’s also a kind of training for us to know how to do a release. It would be a problem if we didn’t try to provide good support for betas, and then jumped straight into final R1 without any preparation
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You make a good case for not using nightlies, except that you haven’t addressed the reason why people DO use nightlies - that they are much more up-to-date than the most recent Beta release.
It’s clear from recent postings that a lot of non-Devs ARE using nightlies, and you have earlier said that they aren’t too time-consuming to produce.
So what do you think? Would it be unfair, or would it be counter-productive, to ask for quarterly or even four-monthly releases?
Is there any way in which non-devs could help?
Because I think more frequent releases would be useful in a number of ways. It’ll look good; it’ll lead to a better experiences for newbies; it might help to encourage/focus the development team; and you could even hide the nightlies completely except from the developer team.
Everyone agrees that more releases would be better. It’s up to the devs to do the work on continuint to automate the process, be better at setting deadlines, etc.
And, no, nightlies shouldn’t be hidden. They are very useful for testing and I appreciate that the users who know their way around here (being active in the forums, bugtracker, etc) will probably want to use these, either because some bugs are fixed, or, more importantly, because it helps finding bugs before they are releases in a beta. If there were no nightlies, this testing would not happen, and our betas would be more full of bugs.
That’s how I view it, there is one tier of users who are involved in the community here, and for these it is fine to use nighlies. But then there are a lot more people that just try Haiku occasionally or more frequently without ever reaching to the community. They just want to be users of an operating system. I suspect there will be more and more of them as Haiku gets more known and more mature. And for these people, using nightlies is a bad idea, it would just create a bad experience for them, maybe not permanently, but whenever there is some occasional breakage. And that would be enough to cause frustration.
That’s all I’m saying: for these users not involved here in the forum or the bugtracker, we have beta versions they can run relatively safely. This is what the webpage download points to and that’s intentional. For you all here, you know your way around Haiku, and you help finding the bugs early before they get to the beta releases, by using the nightlies.
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We had this discussion about the beta before. the nightly versions are for developers and testers. the official beta released is for users. this should run in parallel from the repo server addresses. the beta only gets bug fixes and updates. the nightlys are constantly being recreated in order to check the new development statuses and to correct errors. only when everything is going well and stable in the nightlys can a new official release be made out of it.
Never change a running system. This is a good way.
Make the official Release first viewable and hold the link to the nightlys smal with needed warning of using.
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Good day,
I only use the nightlies too. Mostly to test out hardware and software. They seem to behave fairly OK for now. Truth to be told, I’m lagging in the Game dev tasks, mostly due to Godot not being so stable yet, and the Audio thing. Though for more “regular users” the Betas should be the way to go, imho.
Regards,
RR