psi29a wrote:Already thought about this and it will happen eventually, but there is still going to be a private PPA. So testers get their openmw-beta, which I have been doing by hand anyway but now we can get more coverage. The Private PPA will host the finalized package that awaits to be copied over to the public PPA when release is finalized. It is quite possible they Canonical will say no, in which I would have no choice to keep things 'status quo'.
And what do you thing you will gain by hiding almost-ready-to-be-renamed packages from the public? I think nothing.
What you will lose? Testing coverage. And public involvement mostly, which helps to build communities. Someone else may test the packages and find some nasty packaging bugs you (yourself and the closed beta staff) didn't notice.
This is my suggested workflow, already battle tested by several projects:
When you want to release let's start by creating a stable branch (which you already do), then you can start by tagging betas,
IF you think that the final will almost certainly differ. When you are satisfied by the quality of the last beta you can tag the first RC, which, if everything goes well, is supposed to point to the very same commit of the final. In the meantime packagers started to target betas/RCs and to release their packages in their beta channel/PPA/whatever, so that everyone can test them. When everybody is satisfied with the current release quality a final tag is made, pointing to the same commit of latest RC. Also packages will be renamed to final and published to the stable channel. Otherwise, if something gone wrong, another RC will be issued.
Such a way you will gain all the benefits from the public involvement (which are not limited to better quality packages, the greater benefit will be helping to keep the community alive through people's involvement). You also have no downsides compared to the public PPA approach.
I also suggest you to create a new
PUBLIC forum section called "Release Crafting"/whatever_you_prefer, which will help to avoid confusion allowing to separate contents by topic. Such a forum section should have a
PRIVATE subsection for the youtube videos.
Just my 2 cents
P.S.
If the "final" version is supposed to be still an alpha it doesn't matter at all. That's just a naming convention and openmw is already in a far better shape than lots of other "stable" projects.