α, β and other Greek alphabet soup

By Georges Auberger Georges Auberger Jan 13, 2009 10:04 am Permalink
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Now that Songbird has reached the very mature milestone of 1.0, we reflected on our release process and decided it was time to introduce some changes. We decided to adopt a build labeling nomenclature that’s more widely understood. Our goals for build labels were to:

  • Use commonly understood industry terms
  • Accurately reflect the state of the code and phase of development cycle 
  • Keep it simple, with low overhead on our build team

With that in mind, here is the convention we decided to use going forward:

Development Phase (Alpha)

Builds for code that is under active development will be referred to as Alpha. Essentially anything that comes out of our trunk svn repository will be labelled Alpha. These are the nightly builds we make available, well, daily. Every build has a distinct build number for easy reference in communication, bug reports, etc. While we attempt to ensure that every build compiles and passes our regression tests, the code is nevertheless under active development, so you should accept crash and data loss as a possibility. Proceed with extreme caution. We will still periodically call attention to a blessed build that is particularly worthy of spending time testing. An example of a version number for an Alpha build would be: 1.1.0a. Nightly Alpha builds will continue to be available at http://nightly.getsongbird.com

QA Phase (Beta)

Once we enter the QA phase of a particular release cycle, we will publish Beta builds. Those builds will have had some level of quality assurance and will be accompanied with release notes that highlight known issues. They will not be defect free. They can be used for testing and previewing some of the new features in the release. They will have a distinct build number and also a number indicating which Beta it is. We will do our best to ensure that Beta builds will be automatically upgraded to the next Beta or to the final when available. An example of a version number for a Beta build would be: 1.1.0b1. Beta builds will be promoted at http://nightly.getsongbird.com and in a blog post.

Final

Once we are satisfied with the stability and reliability of the last Beta build, we will turn it into our final build and announce the general availability of the release on our blog. The latest Songbird release can always be downloaded from http://getsongbird.com

Note for Add-on Authors

If you want to make your addon compatible with the trunk nightly builds, you will need to update the max version compatibility string to 1.1.1a instead of 1.1.0pre
The new version labels will be rolled out on Thursday 1/22/09.
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2 Comments

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  1. GeekShadow Jan 13, 2009 2:55 pm Permalink

    So no more “pre” and we now have alpha “a” and beta “b”.

  2. komnik Jan 25, 2009 3:24 pm Permalink

    I know I am out of the topic of this post (except that I am Greek, and you are talking about …Greek soup alphabet) but I found no other place to express my great pleasure that over flood me after launching Songbird a little while ago for the first time.
    I just had to say MY GREAT THANKS FOR SONGBIRD. This was the greatest surprise for me among every other app I installed for the last few years. It resembles me the enthusiasm after launching Firefox at his very early versions.
    You, English speaking people, maybe you can not understand my joy when for the first time in life I was able to (automatically! I just can’t believe it) have lyrics, pictures and videos related to Greek songs!
    MY BEST REGARDS TO ALL CREATORS AND CONTRIBUTORS OF SONGBIRD! PERFECT FUNCTIONALITY AND PERFECT AESTHETICS. BRAVO MY BROTHERS.