RFC: Conditions of early access to unreleased

[Albert Astals Cid]

My proposal:

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The KDE Release Team recognizes the importance of making a source release 
together with binary packages of various distributions since this greatly 
increases the impact of a given release.

To this effect we give the privilege of early access to unreleased tarballs to 
select packagers of distributions

In contrast to the privilege of early access to unreleased tarballs we ask the 
packagers to follow this rules:
 * Do not make the packages available to your users (even in development 
branches) before the official tarballs are announced
 * Report any compilation error you might find as soon as possible to the 
release team mailing list
 * Report any missing package or unpackaged dependency as soon as possible to 
the release team mailing list
     
Reiterated failure to comply with this guidelines might end up in revocation 
of your special access to unreleased tarballs.

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I know the first point might be tricky for some distributions, I'm sincerely 
interested in knowing the opinion of the release team about packages of 
unreleased tarballs being available to the greater public before we make them 
public.

I think that there are good and bad outcomes of that.

Good:
 * We get some *real* early testers out there and find if something fatal is 
happening

Bad:
 * We lose some of the storm since we are "late" to our own release :D

So it turns I'm undecided and don't know if we should un-tighthen the first 
point to something like
 * Do not make the packages available to your users (in stable or 
automatically suggested updates to stable versions) before the official 
tarballs are announced

Comments?

Albert