Which release channel should rc/pre/alpha/beta versions of software be released to?

snapcraft
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I’m wondering how other snapcraft projects handle rc/pre/alpha/beta versions? Do you release them to the beta or edge channels? Do you have a particular git workflow with different branches that map to the various release channels? I’m curious how others handle beta-testing of new software versions (not necessarily beta testing changes to the snapcraft.yaml file itself) via snapcraft?

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For that, usually candidate and edge is used :slight_smile:

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Typically I use candidate for landing updates to snaps that are used out in the field, and I use edge for snaps that I am actively developing and have not released yet.

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For our Mir based snaps:

Channel use
edge Snap main + Mir main branch
beta Snap main + Mir “release”/“release candidate”
candidate Promoted from beta following testing (Mir “release” only)
stable Promote from candidate following “call for testing”
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Ultimately I basically only ever use stable.

Even when outright asking with blog posts to a technical audience on a snap with tens of thousands of users over its lifetime, there’d never actually been any feedback on them, and keeping up with e.g Nightly builds on the edge channel ended up not being worth the effort to myself personally.

Though in theory when I do use them, it’s along the grade property which is stable and devel, candidate holds preview of stable releases (effectively release candidates that could in theory go straight into stable with no code change), whereas beta is tagged pre-releases and edge is nightlies. These by my definitions would never go into stable so in some snaps I do actually set the grade to devel automatically to ensure the store itself will enforce that.

Ultimately I guess a lot of how you approach this comes down to whether Snap itself is seen as part of your offering or only a technical detail of one extra way to get things to your users. Since I only repackage upstream stuff, the stable releases are already 99% tested and the 1% on myself is only sandboxing stuff, that only infrequently changes.

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