[REBOL] Re: Beta Expiration
From: carl:cybercraft at: 24-Jan-2001 14:20
On 24-Jan-01, Karl Robillard wrote:
> Superior perfection? Give me a break. REBOL is a piece of code and
> like all code has bugs and is incomplete. It comes with the
> territory. The only difference between 'beta' code and 'production'
> code is in the name.
I beg to differ. I consider the difference to be that the
production
code is considered by RT to be of a high enough standard
to be used for serious work, that changes to it won't be happening on
a weekly or even monthly basis, and that any upgrades to it are more
likely to be of the bug-fixs and extensions kind than of the "we've
changed this and it'll probably break your scripts" kind.
Beta's on the other hand may have all of the above problems, but then
betas are not made public for people to use for serious work, but to
give those interested an idea of where the software is heading and to
give its producers feedback about it. I find the expirations
annoying too, but it does makes sense. What if one of the
experimental versions had a security flaw? A lot harder to exploit
it when everyone's stopped using it because it's expired.
> I only found out this week on this list that you could query REBOL
> for it's expiration date. Is the 'beta-expiration-date' word
> described in a document somewhere that I missed?
Which is another difference about betas - the full docs come only
*after* they leave beta. (:
--
Carl Read
[carl--cybercraft--co--nz]
