Better testing of tagged tars

[Andrea Scarpino]

LS

Since there is not a clear answer yet, and both the undersigned Distro's
feel a better way of testing the tagged tars is needed during the 4-5 days
before they are officially released, we'd like to make a proposal on behalf
of the Linux distributions Arch Linux and the Chakra-Project.

Consistently we are the first to warn and report about bugs in just
released tars, but neither distro has a good way of building these
packages, store them safely on their servers, and keep them completely
hidden from the public.  Big question truly is why they should be hidden.
Both these distro's do not make it possible for the regular user to find
these packages.  The repo's where they are placed are not on any official
repo list made available to any regular user installing these distro's,
only those with inside info how to edit the needed files, will be able to
find these packages.
We also know there is a fear bug reports for non-released KDE version will
surface, but we both educate our testers to report any issues found
internally, and if it is clear it is not a distro specific bug, not testers
but a distro developer will convey the found bug/issue to the appropriate
channel.

We, as Arch Linux and Chakra-Project developers would like to propose now
to follow the recommendation set by Dirk Mueller in the last long ml thread
regarding this issue, and have the build packages from the tagged tars
available to our testers during the time period between tagging and release.

Arch Linux:
Andrea Scarpino
andrea at archlinux.org

Chakra-Project:
Manuel Tortosa
manutortosa at chakra-project.org
Anke Boersma
abveritas at chakra-project.org