* What is a Project Release? * What are they for? * What are they good for?
Stu (pro) and CMcC (anti) have been hammering on this topic, and a few points can be summarised here:
To generalise, packagers like Project Releases (and developers don't like releases) because:
1 Ease of downloading - packagers don't see why they should learn CVS vs. I had to learn it to create the repository, now you can at least learn login and checkout.
2 Consistency of naming - useful for referencing a given version of a package for bug reporting and fixing vs. apparently names like YYMMDD don't suffice
3 Public statement of committment to the quality of the project's state - packagers assume that a release has undergone QA vs. developers might consider QA a continuous process.
4 Visibility - the perception that something unreleased is non-existent vs. developers don't deal in such perceptions.
5 Reliance/Reliability - a packager is committed to producing packages upon which users can place reliance vs. a developer may be less interested in reliability or reliance.
6 Warranty (related to committment) - a packager is the first point of contact when a package doesn't work, but there's not a lot they can do about it vs. show me where the license warrants anything? I do my best and it's pretty good IMHO.
7 Single metric of performance - a packager prefers stability over functionality vs. a developer prefers functionality over stability [note: gross generalisation]
8 Different user bases - packagers serve end users vs. developers serve fellow developers
9 Discrete QA vs. continuous QA
It's been an interesting argument, and points to a fundamental tension between the goals of the two groups.