Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote:
I totally agree. But then technically _there was_ an almost two-week period during which the RC tarballs were readily available for download and tryout and yet obviously most of our users waited until the release was officially out to start looking at it. In that light, I'm afraid that just prolonging the RC period by itself is not going to be as effective as one might hope for. We need more publicity for the RC period, may be as much as for the actual release.
Two weeks isn't long for testing a new boost release in a commercial project. It took us about a week just to get serialization-1.33.0 compiling in our project (using Borland C++Builder) which was already working with boost-1.32.0 Using the rc/beta in production code is a good test, but we do need time to test it. We also have other priorities at work such as meeting deadlines which can span a two week period and so we could miss the RC period altogether before we get a chance to test things. Weekly zip files from when the branch is frozen may help with this (we aren't in a habbit of trying to get out a CVS working copy for production code) but I think at least a month of the freeze period with weekly tar/zip files of the distro main enable more end-users to test before the actual release. Cheers Russell