Release announcements - wording

Two comments.

Recent release candidate announcements have said:

> The term 'release candidate' means the Subversion developers feel that
> this release is stable and ready for production use, so we encourage
> people to test this release thoroughly.

I wonder if, in our drive to avoid premature distribution, the words "feel that
[...] ready for production use" could be misinterpreted. We rely on people
reading on and allowing the next paragraph to temper their optimism:

> we do not feel that it is ready
> for packaging and providing to end-users [...]
> our policy lets us break compatibility between the
> release candidate and the final release

Suggested replacement for the first paragraph:

   The term 'release candidate' means the Subversion developers feel that
   this release is stable and know of no reason why it would not be fit for
   production use, and it now needs testing by a wider audience. If this
   testing confirms its readiness, this candidate version will become the
   final released version. Therefore we encourage people to test this
   release thoroughly.

Or something like that.

Further on, an improvement to some text that will also be relevant in the final
release announcement:

> [...] Using Subversion 1.5.0-alpha2
> on any working copy created by previous versions of Subversion will
> TRANSPARENTLY upgrade your working copy, which means that production-ready
> versions of Subversion will no longer be able to read it! [...]

The relevance of "alpha2" and meaning of "production-ready versions" is not clear.

Suggested relacement:

   [...] Using this version on any working copy created by Subversion
   1.4 or earlier (or development versions earlier than 1.5.0-alpha2) will
   TRANSPARENTLY upgrade your working copy, which means that those earlier
   versions of Subversion will no longer be able to read it! [...]

(I'm not completely sure if "earlier than alpha2" is actually what it meant...
Please verify for me :-)

- Julian

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Received on 2008-05-16 12:27:59 CEST