[cross-project-issues-dev] Rethinking "invisible" publishing

[Stephan Herrmann <stephan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Several folks have expressed confusion and concerns about the requirement to
keep our final builds "invisible" until release date (when exactly??).

My naive thinking suggests that (in future years) the same could perhaps be
solved completely differently? I have no idea how the early access for Friends
of Eclipse is technically solved, but couldn't we use a similar mechanism so
that everything is "published" only for relengs and testers? Some access 
control that will be removed centrally on release day?

If this restricted publishing could use the final URLs we would be much more
testing "the real thing", without the need for *any* error prone manual
intervention by each project on release day?

excuse me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here...
Stephan