Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] misleading description on Wireshark Download page

From: Balint Reczey <balint.reczey@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 19:46:48 +0100
On 11/06/2011 12:25 AM, Chris Maynard wrote:
Balint Reczey<balint.reczey@...>  writes:

We already provide automated development builds at
ftp://ftp.wireshark.org/automated/ .
I think those are enough. Distributions are also free to package svn snapshots.

That's true, but those automated builds aren't announced on the wireshark-
mailing list(s) when they're made, nor do they appear center-stage on
http://www.wireshark.org/ with the other other stable releases, so I suspect
that there are a lot of users out there that aren't even aware of them.
I think we could emphasize their availability on the front page.


The other thing about the development release is that it's sort of an indication
from the development team that, "yeah, this is a development release and you
might encounter some problems with it, but we believe it's at least in
reasonable enough shape that you should find it useful for most purposes".
Contrast that with automated releases which could contain features in just about
any state of development.  Unless you're following along closely to
wireshark-dev, wireshark-bugs, etc., you probably don't have a good sense of
which automated release is likely OK to use and which you should probably avoid.
When we used to announce development releases we could point users to a set of automated build known to work.


Well, I don't have any particularly strong opinion on this matter either way,
but I'm just presenting some counter-arguments as food for thought.
I think we are used to releasing the development builds, but I don't think they were used widely and we could replace them with announcing interesting automated builds.

Cheers,
Balint


- Chris