Drupal Developer Releases
Though I've only been working with Drupal for about two months, I do have nearly ten years experience developing and testing (mostly web based) applications professionally.
When I recently took a contract to build a complete website in a short period of time, I began researching CMSs (which I've never before used). After about two weeks I narrowed the field down to Drupal, Mambo and TikiWiki. After more in depth research into these three solutions, it was obvious that Drupal was the most developer friendly and "least hacked" of the three, and I began to use it.
Because version 4.7 is soon to be released, I decided it would be wise to build my site based on the latest code. Since there are no development releases, I simply did what I assume most others do and used the CVS HEAD branch. This worked fine for a few weeks until about last week when I came across an apparent incompatibility with PHP5 and some of the code in one of the core modules. Since my Drupal base was derived from a non-tagged set of code, I now have no real way of reverting to a 'working version' as I have no idea when this incompatibility was introduced. Now I could stop all that I'm doing and investigate it, but that's not a very efficient way to work. In fact, I generally would never build upon a dynamic code base, but since that's all that was available for post 4.6.3 code, I didn't have another option. I'd like to propose the idea of developer releases for Drupal. I'm sure most of you know what I'm talking about already, but the idea is that relatively stable code bases that are not yet ready for the final release can be tagged so that testers and developers have reference points to work with.