I am not sure why we need to change release versioning and I don't see a
difference how Eclipse milestones releases differ from beta(s) or RC(s)
that we have for Maven. Eclipse milestones do not freeze APIs until
later stages.
If we want to put production quality releases out there, we have the
option of planning and releasing 'Release Candidates' more oft, such
that they get used/tested by community.
Rahul
Wendy Smoak wrote:
We've been discussing how to version releases over at Archiva, and
seem to have settled on milestones -> final -> patch releases. No
more -alpha and -beta designations in the filename.
Brett summarized the options and gave his opinions:
- Maven style (alpha, beta, final, point release)
- Eclipse style (M1, M2, M3, final, point release - though Eclipse don't have
the last ones) [Spring style then? -ws]
- httpd style (.0.0, .0.1, .0.2, .0.3)
And here are [Brett's] opinions:
- I'm tired of the Maven style. I've heard people actually saying it's ok to
break things because it's just an alpha. I would rather encourage development
practices that mean every release should be production quality.
- But I'm a realist - releases need broader testing to assess production
quality.
- milestones seem more akin to a set roadmap per release that gets done in
stages, rather than timeboxing
- httpd-style can be a little confusing to users, at least at first (will the
real release please stand up?). I think this is mitigated by only putting the
final final releases on release repo and mirrors
- httpd-style is not very effective for "milestones", since you end up making the 20th or
30th release your first "real" release
- Hudson uses the extreme of the last style (everything is a feature release,
everything is a final release)
My preference is httpd-style, where it's just a number and you apply a
quality designation afterwards. But I can live with milestones. :) I
_don't_ like baking the quality into the version number.
Any thoughts on this for Continuum, before we simply go on using the
strategy we inherited from Maven?
