Not to contradict Rone, but the Beta team hasn't exactly been "closed". That's not really the best choice of words. A better term would be "on extended hiatus". And given how long it's been on hiatus, there are those who are still keenly interested in helping out (like those of you here in this thread) and those who no longer have the time/inclination to be guinea pigs. So we ideally need to review the Beta team, re-assess everyone's interest level, etc. That's valuable time that we're instead focusing on actual development right now.
Once we get the remaining issues with the installer sorted out, we'll have a Beta release available. So that raises the question of whether we should release it solely to the "Beta team" first. To my thinking, a Beta team serves two general roles - testing of ideas/approaches and testing of implementation. Nothing in this upcoming Beta release really needs a lot of feedback, as the behavioral things we're changing are really incremental refinements IMO. That just leaves testing the implementation, and there are admittedly some whopping changes in place. Did I hear some way 64-bit?
Fortunately, one thing we've been extremely careful about with all these changes is to avoid any structural modifications to the database. This ensures the new version will be 100% compatible with the existing version you're already using. That means anyone who runs into problems with the new version won't be stuck with it. They can revert back to the existing version and continue using that until we fix any problems that we've missed.
So what we're going to do is release this new Beta to
everyone. It will absolutely be a Beta, and it will be
elective whether you use it. If anyone runs into problems, they can rollback to the current version. This approach allows us to avoid the extra time to curate the Beta team right now, and, more importantly, it gets all the new changes - which seem solid based on our internal testing - into everyone's hands that much faster. Anyone can opt-in to the Beta this time around.
When we reach a point where we need to experiment with some ideas for how to do new stuff in the product, we'll have to dust off all the cobwebs and "get the band back together". You guys have been an awesome help for us over the years, and that's been HUGELY appreciated. Given the deep hole we dug ourselves, we have to take things in steps, and our first step now is to just get everyone this initial wave of improvements.
Thanks!