Terry Reedy wrote:
On 2/27/2012 6:50 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
'rc' makes sense to most people while 'c' is generally unheard of.
'rc' following 'a' and 'b' only makes sense to people who are used to it
and know what it means. 'c' for 'candidate' makes more sense to me both
a decade ago and now. 'rc' is inconsistent. Why not 'ra' for 'release
alpha' or 'ar' for 'alpha release'? In other words, all releases are
releases, so why not be consistent and either always or never include
'r'? (Never would be better since always is redundant.)
I suspect many non-developer users find 'rc' as surprising as I did.
Yes, but you should only find it surprising *once*, the first time you learn
about the standard release schedule:
pre-alpha
alpha
beta
release candidate
production release
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle
Not all releases are equivalent. In English, we can not only verbify nouns,
but we can also nounify verbs. So, yes, any software which is released is *a*
release; but only the last, production-ready release is *the* release. The
others are pre-release releases.
Ain't English grand?
If if you prefer a more wordy but slightly less confusing way of saying it,
they are pre-release versions which have been released.
This reply of mine on the python-list list may also be relevant:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-February/1288569.html
--
Steven
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
