Broadening major release Beta testing

dev
1

First I want to congratulate @bep on delivering this recent major release to the core code of the framework with so few ensuing issues.

I am for one sorry I was not able to help test Hugo .0.55.0 when Björn Eric solicited the community earlier this month. I’m always struggling with compiling from source as I rely too much on brew and end up giving up as work keeps piling on.

I’m wondering if this kind of early stage testing could not be facilitated enough so that users like me (stuck at step x of building form source), could also help test drive future major releases against their projects.

@zwbetz’s post made me realize how trivial it was to run any hugo version from a build file and keep it distinct from your “default” hugo command by simply renaming the binary to whatever you choose.

I wonder how complicated it would be to compile a few binaries with a beta release source in order to broaden the potential reach of such “beta” program.

There’s a lot of intermediate people out there eager to test drive future releases against their combined projects and use cases. They could increase Hugo’s beta testing pool and help spot more issues before the release.

3 Likes
2

Hugo’s release process isn’t prepared for beta/alpha releases, and I’m not sure it’s worth it (and you would not know before you do the work, so that is a chicken and egg situation).

  • And technically we do no major releases, yet (according to semver).
  • More practically: The current master source version is the beta version.

Installing from source is pretty easy. I agree that it may be a challenge to avoid keeping the binaries separated, and we may improve on that, but it’s not a priority on my TODO list.

That said: When I ask for some testing help here on the forum, maybe “having to build from source” is creating a good natural selection of beta testers (avoiding getting lots of “it crashed for me”, without any source reference etc.). It’s not like 0.55 wasn’t extremely thoroughly tested (on 300+ theme demo sites etc.) and that release was kind of special, which is why I asked for help in the first place.