sample-rc-warning-index.html [plain text]
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<title>Subversion @VERSION@ tarballs</title>
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<h1 style="font-size: 30pt; text-align: center;
text-decoration: underline">WARNING</h1>
<p>The code you are about to download is a <i>Release Candidate</i>
for Subversion @VERSION@.</p>
<p>A <i>Release Candidate</i> is exactly what it sounds like: a
distribution of Subversion that may become an official release later,
<i>if and only if</i> it passes preliminary testing by those members
of the community who are interested in testing it.</p>
<!-- , which means it is considered <strong
style="text-decoration: underline">UNRELEASED</strong> code. The
term 'release candidate' means the code works to the best knowledge
of the Subversion developers, but that it still requires testing by a
larger number of people to root out bugs.</p> -->
<p>As such, if you are interested in helping us test this Release
Candidate, you're very welcome to download and test these packages.
If you are looking for a copy of Subversion for production use, this
is <i>not it</i>; you should instead grab the latest stable release
from the <a
href="http://subversion.tigris.org/project_packages.html">Download
area</a>.</p>
<h2 style="font-size: 18pt">Note to operating system distro package
maintainers</h2>
<p>As stated above, this is <i>not</i> an official, end-user release
of Subversion. It is a distribution intended for testing only. Please
do <i>not</i> package this distribution in any way. It should not be
made available to users who rely on their operating system distro's
packages.</p>
<h2 style="font-size: 14pt">Why shouldn't I set up/make available a
Release Candidate for production use?</h2>
<p style="font-size: 11pt">(Taken from a <a
href="http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2005-11/1295.shtml"
>mail by Karl Fogel</a> on the subject)</p>
<p style="font-size: 11pt">Subversion release candidates are for
testing only. We might have to withdraw one to fix bugs, and fixing
those bugs might involve changing APIs, or changing a soft-upgrade
strategy in the repository or working copy formats. If some production
users had begun depending on the new API, or had unknowingly
soft-upgraded their repository or working copy, then they'd be in for
a very unpleasant suprise when the real release comes out and doesn't
have the same API anymore, or doesn't use the same formats. Not only
would Subversion suddenly "stop working" for them, but there wouldn't
be any convenient path to get it working again, since no blessed
Subversion release would have the code needed to interpret their
legacy data.</p>
<p style="font-size: 11pt">We encourage RC testing by users who know
how to install from a tarball independently of their OS's packaging
system. Users who install only packaged releases, however, should wait
for and use only officially released Subversions. Anything else is
playing with fire. When the inevitable blowup happens, both your
reputation as a packager and Subversion's reputation will suffer --
but only one will deserve it.</p>
<p>If you want to help us test this distribution of Subversion, you
can find the files <a href="@DIRNAME@/">here</a>.</p>
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