[sles-beta] Beta 1 release on Friday

[Stefan Behlert]

Hi all,

We know you are eagerly waiting for more information, and - especially - the
first iso-images for this Beta.


In the schedule you will see soon on this list you may notice that the planed
release date for a beta milestone is normally a Thursday. We kindly ask you to
treat this as a _planned_ date. Depending on the timezone you are in, and the
bugs found by our QA, the release could be on Thursday or Friday.

For Beta1, the release is currently expected this Friday, as QA found in the
Acceptance tests an issue that we rather wanted to get fixed than have Beta1
released this Thursday.


"What's he meaning with Acceptance tests?" you may ask.

Let me give you a litle bit of insight into the creation of a milestone. If you
are not interested in these details, you can stop reading now, as it gets
lengthy but has no vitally important information for the Beta program ;)


For each of the products of this Beta program, we build nearly daily images
(sometimes more than one;)) and test them through some automated tests.

When the time of a Beta release approaches, one of these image builds will be
declared a 'Beta-candidate' and gets distributed to our internal QA.

The QA experts are then doing the real, serious, tough acceptance tests. If
those reveal no serious problems, the build will be the next Beta. If
serious problems are found, we decide either if we can solve them with an
update or if we need a new Build.

The latter costs quite some time (we have to wait for the fix to be created,
the package to be build, everything tested...).
The first alternative is faster, of course, but less convenient for everyone
installing the Beta.
After the build is renamed to 'Beta X', announcements are send to various
mailing lists, and the isos are uploaded to the download area.
Soon you have then the isos, and can do your testing.

Thanks for reading this small piece of "Inside-SUSE".

	ciao,
	  Stefan


-- 
Stefan Behlert, SUSE LINUX
Release Manager Enterprise Server
 
Maxfeldstr. 5, D-90409 Nuernberg, Germany
Phone +49-911-74053-173
SUSE LINUX GmbH, Nuernberg; GF: Felix Imendoerffer, Jane Smithard, Dilip Upmanyu, Graham Norton, HRB 21284 (AG Nuernberg)