Originally Posted by qgil

As you can deduce from the versioning, there is several builds every week. In practice one or more updates a day. In every update there are a number of fixes integrated through package updates. If you have been in this distro integration work you know that the quality among releases might vary from one release to another just in one iteration.

From time to time we prepare one release with a specific purpose out of the R&D team, be a release for wider internal testing within the people at Nokia that has a device, be a Summit, etc.

These special releases require special attention, and now all our special attention is concentrated on the sales release. The team focusing in this release is after a small collection of remaining issues. Most of the development is concentrating already on the first maintenance release.

The feedback from Summit users has been useful confirming our own testing of the sales candidate and is being useful as well to prioritize bugs to be addressed in the maintenance release.
This is software development as usual.

Now, opening the can of public daily releases would bring probably a lot more noise than signal. Don't think only on the good samaritans reporting issues. Think also about a crowd of potential end users with pre-orders or thinking on an early purchase - without any background or experience in (open source) software development. Think also in a very thirsty blogosphere and IT media looking for Maemo/N900 related news and happy to highlight any details about problems, bugs, etc, days before an expected sales start.

This is not what an R&D team needs right before completing a final release. We experimented already a lot loaning these 300 pre-production devices with beta software to people free to do and explain whatever they want in public.

You can criticize the decisions but you can't deny that what we are doing with this release hasn't been done before by Nokia or any company in its league.