[support] Beta versions

[John Fletcher]

What an interesting discussion.  I think the core answer to your real question is: No - it's not a reason to worry, to fault the developers or "accuse" them of doing something wrong.  They probably know what they are doing.  I don't think your developers would be offended if you "humbly" ask them about it (in a non-accusing way).

The bottom line is that we all work within budgetary and other constraints.  Sometimes there is a dev module that does what we want and we are faced with using it or coding our own solution.  Sometimes a bug is fixed and committed to dev and it's vital to get that implemented on the site ASAP (I have faced both these situations recently).  It all depends on what you need.  I released www.cai.org on views and CCK alpha (D6) versions because that's all there was!  That was a risky move because thousands of man-hours went into it and potentially could have been lost if something had gone majorly wrong, e.g. with the DB, but it was a calculated risk based on the desire for the D6 i18n features which are a critical component of the site.

Once you get to know drupal you also start to monitor the project pages and issue queues and you get the feeling for which developers produce quality code, deal with issues, etc and you can be more confident with using their stuff, even in pre-release versions.

Fletch