Why are 4.8.80 packages already out in the wild?

[Martin Gräßlin]

Hi all,

this weekend KWin received bug reports against 4.8.80 from distro packages 
([1], [2]). This quite surprised me as beta should not be out before Monday.

Now I concider this as an issue if users can report bugs for a version we do 
not yet expect. E.g. in KWin I had not yet created the version information - I 
wanted to do this on Monday after the release. Because of that bug 301068 had 
been reported incorrectly against 4.8.2 which quite confused me.

For Beta 1 this seems not so much an issue, but for Beta 2 such too early 
releases can waste quite some time. Consider we don't notice and investigate 
why a bug fix did not work? And even if we notice we have to spend time asking 
the user to verify which version was actually in use.

So I would like to know, what's the reason why distros ship the packages too 
early and whether we find it acceptable that distros ship the packages too 
early.

Cheers
Martin

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=301068
[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=301079
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