Another way of asking this question is "Is there a list of features that
need to be completed before the team will consider the project to be
feature-complete"?

>From several decades of dealing with product and project life-cycles, the
alpha and beta tags most certainly have a relationship to features in
user's eyes:

   -     An Alpha project is presumed to be main-feature-complete and
   main-use-case stable, but not bug free or feature complete, while
   -     a Beta project is presumed to be both feature complete and stable
   enough to be usable outside the development community
   -     The alpha phase usually ends with a feature freeze, indicating
   that no more features will be added to the software. At this time, the
   software is said to be feature complete.
   -     Some software is kept in perpetual beta—where new features and
   functionality are continually added to the software without establishing a
   firm "final" release.

It may well be that SSHD is an instance of the last "style"...

  -John



On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Guillaume Nodet <[email protected]> wrote:
> Alpha and beta usually refer to maturity, not features.
> We don't call it alpha or beta because it's not, though the fact that sshd
> is not feature complete means that the api may need to change a bit to
> accommodate new features, hence the 0.x version.  Fwiw, missing features
> are mostly on the client side, and the server does not change much but for
> bug fixes or minor improvements.

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