> I don't agree. There is no way that we can do sufficient testing of the > code itself, packaging, documentation etc. etc. to warrant making this > our primary distribution channel. > It currently is our primary distribution channel currently and has been it from about 6 months after 1.0 was released. We by then we had bugs fixes and improvements that no one was inclined to back port and so were recommending that people switch to SVN.
I suspect that if we are going to make releases work we need to have them every 6 months or so, otherwise we will end up in the same situation again. And I'm not sure people are up for interruptions that often. And given that, currently, almost everyone using IMP is using the SVN version, I'm not sure there is a case to be made that more cleanup is needed.
> And a periodic stable release is 1) an > excellent way to motivate us to polish things from time to time rather > than always being in development and
I agree, but one can just as well put that effort into periodically cleaning up SVN and writing better tests. Admittedly, it doesn't have the same push behind it, though.
> 2) is mandated anyway by our funding.
Well, from what I recall, we didn't specify how we do releases, so continuous releases like this should be OK :-)