Thorsten wrote in Tue Jul 30, 2019 6:08 pm:That's conjecture because it actually isn't advertized very actively - 2019.3 will be.
Removing it from the sourceforge download page helps. That was my personal primary source of confusion. (It would also be interesting to compare the numbers downloading from sourceforge to other mirrors )
That's what it de-facto is, but since nobody tested things named 'release candidate', the idea was to change the name to 'technical release' or so that people actually test it and report back - so by 2019.3 we would have the feedback needed.
Perhaps the forum for release candidates would need a little reviving then. Also, if RCs are now not needed it would make more sense to do away with them for all releases bar the so called long term stable.
Also - another point, I know a fair number of people were using the RC - probably about ten of them - since May and they weren't reporting problems. Perhaps silence could be taken as consent in this case especially given 2019.1 isn't meant to be perfectly stable.
It's clearly not advertized as stable, nor has it even been announced ... if people download and test it, that's intended, ... we can explain in case of problems that it isn't the stable release to have.
That makes sense, thank you for explaining.