Before we moved to the ASF, the Subversion project had a habit of
running our pre-releases on our live repository, and I wonder if there
would be benefits to putting the 1.7.0 alphas on svn.apache.org.
The server-side of 1.7.0 has seen several enhancements, but unlike the
client, where much of the working copy library was rewritten, the
server-side improvements were largely incremental (and in some cases
they even replaced harmful "features"). As such, if feels like
testing 1.7.0 in the production ASF repository is a minimally risky
move, while providing several potential benefits.
For the Subversion devs, the benefits of running the alpha series are numerous:
* better testing on a large dataset, (with easy access to the admins
for better analysis)
* enable testing of client-side HTTPv2 in real-world usage
* smaller repo size by using revprop packing
* general pride of eating our own dogfood
There are some drawbacks, however:
* frequent alpha releases could keep infra busy upgrading (but
turnaround on bugfixes should be fast)
* general hazards of running lightly-tested software (corruption, crashes, etc)
I don't recall if we ran alphas on svn.collab.net during the 1.5 cycle
(we certainly ran RCs) and running the alphas in production might be a
bit premature. I'm not yet sure how I personally feel about it, but
just wanted to know how others felt, both from the Subversion
developer side, as well Infra.
-Hyrum
Received on 2011-06-13 09:45:57 CEST