One worry I had about releasing git-1.5.0-rc2-1.rpm and friends
just like the "official" ones was that people might have scripts
to automate downloading & updating of packages, and they may not
like to get "beta" installed for them.
I wonder if kernel.org machines are also affected...
I know it's a bit late to ask, but if new on-disk format changes, isn't
it time to bump the version to 2.0? It would be easier for many people to
remember that GIT 1.X uses format version 1 and that GIT 2.X uses format
version 2 with backwards compatibility with 1.X. I also think that 1.5
is much more different from 1.0 than a mid-term 2.0 would be from current
1.5.
I think we could have gone either way (as you said, it is
probably a bit too late to discuss this), but it should probably
be Ok to stay at 1.X as long as these one-way-street format
updates are turned off by default.
And the above happened way before this round and people have
hopefully been happily using. For example, v1.4.2 was done
early August 2006.