Focusing Those Binoculars
Some of our astute ornithologists have noticed us busily working on the Songbird1.7 (known as the “Nirvana”1) release and have asked where the builds are.
Starting with this release, we’ve made a slight change to how we deliver release-branch builds: we’ll be calling out specific builds off of the release branch to focus attention on, instead of having every nightly build published.
We’re making this change for a couple of reasons:
- Reduce churn on incoming issues that are known, but which need to then be triaged and percolate through the development process.
- To point developers and users to builds we know are worth looking at; we want to help focus the precious testing time our development and end-user community donates to looking at bits that are more “known quantities,” so they’re not frustrated with issues that are both known and which we’re actively working on fixing during release cycle.
This change will not affect source code availability via publicsvn; developers will still be able to pull release branches and build from source.
Additionally, builds from trunk and project branches2 will also continue to be provided nightly3.
When we do have release builds that you’ll want to look at, we’ll publish betas via the Nightly Builds page, just as we always have.4
Enjoy the (clearer) birdwatching!
(This post was originally published on Songbird’s blog; to comment, head on over there!)
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1 The release may—or may not—smell like teen spirit.
2 Such as the GStreamer Integration branch
3 At least, as long as there’s a check-in for that day
4 For those who have birdwatched forever, we may even bring back “blessed builds” when it makes sense to do so!