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