F17 proposal - prerelease version name changes

[Kevin Kofler]

Michał Piotrowski wrote:
> Microsoft has changed the way of prerelease version naming
> Alpha -> Developer Preview
> Beta -> Consumer Preview
> Release Candidate -> Enterprise (or Business) Preview

Ugh, no thanks!

I'd suggest going with the naming KDE, a leading Free Software project uses:
Alpha → Beta
Beta → RC
Alpha/Beta/Release Candidate → Beta/RC/Release try
(The last rename is needed because otherwise you'd have 2 kinds of "RC"s. 
:-) The "try" term is what KDE uses on the kde-packager mailing list for 
what is essentially the equivalent of our "candidates". It's also shorter 
than "candidate" and makes it clearer that the last try will be released as 
is, "RC" has lost that meaning (which it did originally have) for years in 
the Free Software world, so people are really surprised when we tell them we 
don't respin the ISOs between the last RC and Gold.)

Incidentally, this is also very close to what we used to use until Fedora 
11, which was Beta / Preview rather than Alpha / Beta. I think the current 
naming misleads developers into thinking their work can be much less ready 
than it should be for the milestones, and I blame the Fedora 12 slippages, 
and to a lesser extent the slippages of more recent releases, on it.

        Kevin Kofler