Re: [libreoffice-website] Fwd: Download - "Safe for ... most users and enterprises"

Hi Flo, *;

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Florian Effenberger
<floeff@documentfoundation.org> wrote:
> I just got this feedback via e-mail and thought I'd pass it on to this list.
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Download - "Safe for ... most users and enterprises"
> Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:12:32 +1300
> To: floeff@documentfoundation.org
>
> Thanks for your regular updates on the announce list, much appreciated.
>
> Just a little confused about this message attached to a *final*
> release on the Downloads page mentioned in your last email.
>
> "LibreOffice 3.4.4 Final (2011-11-09)
> Safe for production use by most users and enterprises."
>
> Is the phrase - "Safe for ... most users and enterprises" - explained
> any where please?

"Safe" in this case doesn't mean "secure" (all builds are considered
equally secure/we wouldn't release a build with known security
vulnerabilities) or in "no data loss" (all released builds don't
contain any known bugs where it is easy to loose data) but "safe" in
the sense of "doesn't contain bugs that a user will likely hit in
daily business".

LO uses a release early, release often schedule, thus the X.Y.0 or
X.Y.1 versions might still contain known bugs that affect a certain
user group, but not the casual user.
Thus when a release is not labeled "safe", you are *strongly*
encouraged to review the "known issues" section in the release notes
whether you are likely to hit the known bugs in your daily use. If the
bug is in impress, but you never use impress, you can use it. If the
bug is in some database reports, but you don't use the database, you
can use it. If the bug is when exporting to <some exotic format>, and
you never save to those, you can use it,....

If you want to deploy it in bigger scale, where you don't know what
features your user will use, then wait for the "safe" builds that
don't contain known bugs that would cause trouble because a feature is
non-functional/so buggy that you would have to use awkward
workarounds.

And last but not least: as the release will be in use by many "brave"
people already, it will have some testing in the wild - as you cannot
test every possible use case before releasing a build, this will
further ensure that the "known bugs" are not narrowly scoped to
"whatever functionality the QA folks did bother to check", but really
"known bugs" in the sense of "thousands of users don't have a problem
with LibreOffice"

If anyone feels like writing this up to some general-purpose
description to put on the website: Feel free to convert the above to
some nice-sounding words :))

ciao
Christian

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