Re: [CORE] Restore-reliability mode

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To play devil's advocate for a moment, is there anyone who would genuinely
be prepared to download and install an alpha release who would not already
have downloaded one of the nightlies? I only ask because I assume that
​releasing ​
an alpha is not zero-developer-cost and I don't believe
​that​
there's a large ​
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number of people who *would *be happy to install something that's described
as being buggy and subject to change but are put off by having to type
"configure" and "make".
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Further, it seems to me that the number of people who ​won't roll their own
who are useful as bug-finders is even smaller.

I get the feeling that the argument appears to be "Bruce doesn't want to
release a beta, Simon wants to release something. Let's release an alpha
because it's sort-of half way in between" as a consensus compromise (I'm
not deliberately picking on specific people, I'm aware you're not the only
two involved and arguing for either side, but you do seem to be fairly
polar opposite sides of the argument :) ); I don't really believe that
releasing an alpha moves anything further forward from a testing point of
view, and I'm fairly sure that it will have just as dele
terious effect on bugfixing as would a beta
​, with the added disadvantage of the extra developer cost.

​Geoff​