I welcome the announcements about the upcoming/testing releases of J! I welcome the announcements about under-development releases—Release Candidates—with J! 3.9. We have had a couple of these announcements in the past few months, e.g. viewtopic.php?f=8&t=983632, viewtopic.php?f=8&t=984995, viewtopic.php?f=8&t=985813, viewtopic.php?f=8&t=986469 and many others.
I welcome the announcement about the first RC release for J! 4.0.
Wonderful stuff.
The purpose of these announcements is a call-to-action: the announcement asks people to test these RC versions. Fair enough and it would be good to get a sense of how well that call is received.
I wonder if we could treat these announcements in a similar way to the way that we treat announcements about stable releases? That is, create topics in the Announcements Discussion forum where these RC releases can be discussed.
I realise this may sound like radical idea but it's not new. Similar discussions were allowed with the announcements about RC versions for J! 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 and 3.x. For some reason that practice ceased and I think that's unfortunate.
The benefit of having discussions like these is to engender a unified environment, i.e. they allow ordinary users to provide their feedback. They bring together the "three Cs": the code, the community and the culture. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Announcements shouldn't be entirely one-sided. This is a discussion forum, after all, and we should be able to discuss these things.
