Pull freeze

[David Nadlinger]

On Tuesday, 31 July 2012 at 15:54:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> I thought a good thing to do is use branching for releases, and 
> that we can start doing that without much difficulty. No?

I think doing that would be a good idea. Some people might prefer 
fancier branching schemes, given that handling them is much more 
painless with Git than with SVN, but this doesn't prevent us from 
implementing release branches as a first step.

What's also important from a »million users« point of view is 
that the origins of every release artifact is traceable, both 
internally and for users, both in terms of source code and 
tools/commands to prepare the archives. This also applies to beta 
releases: Please, PLEASE let's start to properly name them 
(dmd-2.060-beta1.zip) along with tagging the respective revisions 
in Git and keeping the old versions around, instead of just 
overwriting a single archive with unknown (and routinely broken) 
contents. Otherwise things are bound to become chaotic once more 
than us 15-ish people actually test the betas.

Which reminds me: We really need to announce the beta releases 
more publicly, i.e. in the forums, on the website, on Twitter, 
IRC, etc. Once a release is out, we can't take it back, but I'm 
sure there are many enthusiastic D users who wouldn't mind 
running their projects/test suites against the compiler once 
before the official release if they were only asked to. It's easy 
to forget if you are subscribed to all the mailing lists, but the 
visibility of an upcoming release is almost zero until it is out 
of the door. Yes, we have [dmd-beta], but it takes extra effort 
to subscribe to it – more people are subscribed to 
digitalmars.D.announce via the mail gateway then to the 
low-volume beta list!

David