I'm going to chime in and hope not to add more confusion to the debate.
I apologize if I do.
Like others, I see 2 very different issues with the naming convention:
1- a "marketing" (i.e. external facing) issue
2- a technical issue
Let's start with 2- the technical issue. The naming scheme we are using
right now has been chosen just after 0.6 so that we could have
consistently marked milestones for both the "going to 0.7" trunk and the
"0.6 bug fixes" branches. The consensus at the time was that "0.6.<num>"
will denote an iteration of the 0.6 code base (bug fixes of some kind),
"0.7x<num>" a milestone on the way to 0.7. There was a lot of debate on
what "x" should be ("dev", "r", "a", "m", etc... note that it couldn't
be nothing since it would collide with future versions, it couldn't be
"." either since it would collide with post 0.7 bug fix releases) and we
finally took a vote and choose "alpha". Note that this was chosen to be
consistent with how PJE's egg decodes and compares the release numbers.
This is the numbering we use in the tar, dmg, eggs, svn, bugzilla,
etc... all activity where we need to mark something and understand just
reading the label where it fits in the milestone tree.
Like PJE, I think we should not change that.
The first true release of 0.7 will simply be, well, 0.7.... whatever
marketing term we use to qualify its "it's not finished yet" state...
We'll certainly have a bunch of "0.7.x" bug fix releases after that
since we'll likely have recall class bugs found by users we'll have to
fix on a stable branch. The trunk will happily hum away toward 0.8 and
start churning 0.8alpha<num> milestones on a regular basis.
1- marketing issue
I've no religion here. "beta" seemed fine to me though I agree that it
collides with the technical term (especially since we do use "alpha") so
we should stay away from it.
"Preview" sounds about right to me. I remember that when doing the first
MacIE 5.1 for OS X we called it "Technical Preview" in the splash screen
(since Apple never gave us the time to test it against the OS they
eventually released...).
This term will be visible in the Splash Screen, About box, Download
page, and PR activity.
Conclusion, I'm inclined to:
- replace our use of "beta" by "Preview" for all our marketing communication
- use "dogfood" internally when talking about our "alpha" milestones
- not change our use of "alpha" by something else in our numbering scheme
Cheers,
- Philippe
Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 06:06 PM 8/29/2006 -0700, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
Perhaps both Cosmo and Chandler could use the "m" notation for
milestones between releases?
I'd personally prefer to stick with using "alpha" to denote interim
releases, as I believe those are more widely-understood terms for the
audience(s) that those releases are directed at, and because of the
cost/benefit of making such a change. But that might just be because
I'm not seeing what the benefit is; it's not as if Cosmo and Chandler
are using a common technology platform for creating releases. Perhaps
the intended benefit of consolidation lies somewhere else that I'm not
immediately seeing?
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