I came across this post, which announces the first alpha of 2.1. on the NHibernate Google Group. Someone commented that they were looking forward to the final 2.1 release. Fabio’s reply was so awesome that I am including the text verbatim (emphasis mine):
Work with final stable release is a very good practice in a lot of
commercial projects; this is good even for us (nh-team) because we can work
with only 1500 or 2000 pioneers using the trunk between final releases.When we release an Alpha1 and Alpha2 we are saying : Man, download it and
try it in your project and if you find some bug use our JIRA.
The time between Alpha1 and GA (General Available-final release) is around
2.5/3 months; if you find a breaking-change or a re-opened issue or a bug
after GA you will wait around 1 year to have the next GA with that issue
fixed.We have a lot of tests (more than 1600) but we know that we are not testing
all possible “combination”.
Don’t wait that somebody else, download the new NH and run tests of yours
applications.The quality is not achieved by chance.
—
Fabio Maulo
This logic is not just applicable to OSS projects. Look at ASP.NET MVC Framework or the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The direction of both of these have been significantly influenced by the community. And that means you. So go and download something and then tell the author what you liked and what you didn’t. It’s going to benefit everyone in the long run.
Good post! 1
I don’t have a problem with downloading Alpha’s/Beta’s to take a look at new functionality when it’s my time & $. But this has been a major (as in sacking) contention point at one company I’ve worked at where our “architect” and OSS advocate pushed for, and in this case slipped in beta dependencies into our product. There was too much time invested in working around incomplete functionality, only to spend more time re-factoring to use the “new” as it became available.
the moral is to make sure you have buy-in from the people that pay for your time and salary before deciding to “invest” in alphas. Don’t be too surprised when the answer you get is a firm “No.” 😉