Lately we've been following a pretty aggressive release schedule with a new Final released every 4 to 6 weeks. We want to continue having frequent releases, but at the same time it would be good to give people the opportunity to test things out in advance of a release.

I propose we continue doing releases every 4-6 weeks, but instead of going straight to Final we'll release a CR1. If there are no high priority issues reported against within a week we'll release the Final. Otherwise we'll release CR2, but this time reduce the wait to roughly half a week before releasing Final (or CR3).

We would not support migrating between CR releases as they are purely targeted towards testing. These releases should only be used in staging/test environments. Ideally with a copy of the production database. Basically that would mean that upgrading from 1.6.0.Final to 1.7.0.CR1 and then upgrading to 1.7.0.Final would not work. You would have to upgrade directly from 1.6.0.Final to 1.7.0.Final.

I'd like to ask the community is this something that would be beneficial? Would you actually play with and test release candidates, or would you simply wait for the Final to be released?