NOTE this is not a "pick on other devs" reply, I'm not intending it to be harsh or rude, but it's an Internet reply, and sometimes things can come off that way.
Let's not forget this is " FREE " software, The XUB team has spent thousand's of hours of their own free time on this and they get nothing out of it monetary wise
Absolutely, which is why I'd like to see more people able to easily grab the latest release and test it on their card(s). Making releases more accessible is 100% in line with the goal of faster adoption of new versions. I also understand that the people slinging x86 ASM are probably not the same people who want to be bothered with writing or maintaining websites, hence the suggestion to maybe consolidate it to a single site and/or move it to GitHub. Yes, I know that potentially means re-learning some of the software tools that the devs are currently using, but if you want more participation it helps to use the source control tool that most of the open source world seems to be using. An insistence on sticking the CVS does sometimes hurt contributions to the OpenBSD project, for instance.
So let's not start giving them frigging grief, If you don't like the 'Beta' designation the simple answer is don't use the software
That's what I'm currently doing (not using beta versions, that is), but every time someone mentions it, there seems to be confusion as to *why* people are still using the 1.1.5 release. Hence my attempt to explain why I'm using the 1.1.5 release, and why I think other people might be doing the same.
That seems contrary to having an open source community project.
Getting something to work flawlessly takes time and people who are willing to spend their " Own free time " testing the software and giving feedback, And there hasn't been a lot of that going on for a long while, And that's not the fault of the XUB team.
I realize that no one can test on every available platform. Is there some sort of feedback mechanism for reporting compatibility and issues? I don't mean a forum thread, no one wants to dig through 30 pages of thread to figure out which version of the BIOS is most likely to work on their system. If there isn't and a textfile that people submit pull requests to isn't sufficient, I can throw together a little something or other to log and display results.
Again, I think two big, relatively painless steps in getting people using the 2.x XUB would be to (1) remove the "beta" label if the devs really feel it's ready and (2) start providing 8K builds that will "just work" with the boot menu and whatnot. The rev 3 boards and Lo-Tech boards both left the serial port off, so removing serial disk/floppy support, adding the boot menu, and building that as another binary output in the release process shouldn't cause too much headache/confusion for the users.
And if making build changes like that is a headache for the XUB devs, they need to reach out to the community and explain that. I, for one, would have no problem/trouble setting up a CI server for XUB builds so that anytime there's a commit to a production/release/whatever branch, a new batch of binaries get built and pushed to a server. I do it for my day job. I have spare hardware to run it on.
