[Camino] branch vs. trunk builds

[Stuart Morgan]

On Dec 11, 2006, at 1:51 PM, ascheinberg.39354135 at bloglines.com wrote:

> Camino is a simple, lean
> browser for Mac users.  Macs are for people who want simple, well  
> designed
> software (amongst other things).  Camino doesn't need to publically  
> participate
> in this confusion.

We don't.  We have very clear links to the stable versions, and we  
have a link which we maintain on the development page which always  
points to the builds that we think adventurous users should try.  The  
FTP servers are more or less direct products of the build system, not  
something we expect users to interact with.  They are public only in  
the sense that it's an open source product, where everything is  
public; like the source, the build system is public primarily for  
developers.  End-users should be interacting with caminobrowser.org.

> The "trunk" build of Camino is the
> base for the next release of Camino.  While it may have signficant  
> features
> changes, it's less stable than the branch build. Blah blah... Click  
> here to
> download

This isn't accurate.  The branch build is the base for the next  
release of Camino.  The trunk is significantly more experimental.  It  
has no immediate relevance for users.

> No need to get complex about it.

Exactly, which is why we present a simple interface through  
caminobrowser.org: if you want stable builds, click here.  If you  
want the latest development builds, click over there.  Absolutely no  
need to understand the terminology.  Your suggested scheme would  
actually create confusion by confronting all users with terminology  
that they don't need to understand, and that we are currently  
abstracting away for most people.

> Know who wants this? Users - even technical
> ones - who are comfortable evaluating a beta product that may have  
> some bugs
> but isn't interested in navigating the terminology.

And every one of those people should be using the build we link to on  
the development page, which is always the build we are doing our  
primary development on, and which will become the next release.  They  
will generally gain very little in terms of features, but get a lot  
more instability, if they start using other builds.

-Stuart