F17 proposal - prerelease version name changes

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 09:21 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 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.

I don't think the nomenclature is anywhere near as important as this
thread makes it seem, and see no need to change it. I don't think any
benefit would arise from twiddling with the names. The Alpha / Beta /
final system we have now is fine, IMHO, and there's no point wasting
effort fiddling with it. We use terms that have existed for many years
and are still widely understood in the context we operate in (software
development), under their correct definitions.

It may, however, be worth doing something with the naming of TCs / RCs,
as has been proposed in the past, because they do seem to confuse
people.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net