

JQuery 1.4.3 Release Candidate 1 Released - emilepetrone
http://blog.jquery.com/2010/10/10/jquery-1-4-3-release-candidate-1-released/

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pilif
what is it about jQuery never putting out release notes for pre-releases? If
they want these releases to be tested by a broader audience, they should IMHO
document better what has changed.

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jeresig
I don't see the point in doing so - the important part is getting some
developers to put the copy of jQuery into their page to see if there are any
regressions. Additionally we provide focus on the general areas of the library
that had major changes.

There's actually a lot of concern with making the pre-releases _too_ enticing
to end users. If we make it appear as if it's a completed release (it's not)
then user's will be more likely to try and use it as if it were - and that
will certainly cause problems. We want to make sure that after this testing
phase is complete we never have to hear about another jQuery 1.4.3rc1-related
bug, again.

Note that the release was also done at about 11:30pm on a Sunday night before
a U.S. holiday. We actually want to make sure that we're hitting a minimum of
the full jQuery audience - just enough of the power users to dig in and see if
any regressions occurred - without saturating the full jQuery userbase.

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pilif
I understand your reasoning, but I'm just a bit afraid that you won't get
enough testing like this. As we know by now, even pre-releases with release
notes don't get tested enough, often forcing a quite early point release.

By making the testing base even smaller than what it would anyways be, you'll
lose even more bug reports.

I'm sure though, you weighted in both the advantages of both systems before
going this route, so that's fine.

On a positive note: My huge webapp runs fine with 1.4.3-rc1 :-)

~~~
jeresig
It is absolutely true that after a release there is, at least, some number of
bug reports that pop up (regressions, browser issues, etc.). Having a pre-
release helps to mitigate a lot of that.

In our experience it appears as if the vast majority of the big bugs are found
by the power users during the pre-release. We've tried a number of strategies
to try and engage a larger audience - but at the end of the day the only thing
that seems to work is actually releasing the code (we have to remember that
many of the causal jQuery users are likely scared to try something that isn't
a final release - either due to time or lack of interest). While we would love
a 100% bug-free release - it doesn't seem to be feasible (although the
increasing test coverage is certainly cutting down the total number of edge
cases that we don't know about).

At the time of this comment we're getting around 4.5m unique visitors to the
jQuery site every month - getting a small fraction of that to test a pre-
release is more than enough to cover most of the potential problems and make
for a good release at the end of the day.

