Renaming the next beta to alpha2?

[Allen Winter]

On Monday 18 June 2007 1:43:17 pm Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Monday 18 June 2007 19:16:33 Tom Albers wrote:
> > Op zo 17 jun 2007 03:31 schreef u:
> > > On Sunday 17 June 2007, tomalbers at kde.nl wrote:
> > > > ok, the question is if we can deliver what a user expects from a beta,
> > > > a complete desktop with some small bugs.
> > >
> > > give me a moment to recover from laughing.
> > >
> > > whew.. ok. so. the question is whether the user expectations are
> > > unrealistic and we don't care or whether we should try and pander to
> > > these expectations.
> >
> > I'm a bit surprised this thread has not had any more reactions. I would
> > love to know what Sebas, Wade, Coolo, Dirk, David, Laurent, Pino and others
> > think.
> 
> I feel that we should freeze the libs and move into app development 
> *right_now* (mostly what coolo said on core-devel yesterday). For really 
> important stuff that surfaces in the process of stabilising and getting apps 
> in place, it should be possible to make exceptions to the freeze. 
> 
> Whether we want to call it alpha or beta, I don't know. It's not 
> feature-complete from an application's point of view, but then, the release 
> schedule is not clear on what's meant by a 'beta'. What date do others have 
> in mind for a "total feature freeze, only bugfixes from now on"?
> 
> I do also feel that I'm fairly inexperienced with this kind of stuff, never 
> followed a big release like this really closely. That said, I'm quite 
> confident in the state of what's there right now.

I don't think we disagree that the libs should be frozen according
to the original plan.  And I don't think we disagree that it would
be ok to have 1 more bic Monday on 25 June.

The only real disagreement (I think) is if we are ready to make a
release we call "beta".  And, it really is just a name.  And as
Shakespeare once famously wrote "... a rose by any other name...".

To save a lot of bad press, it might be prudent to call the next release Alpha2.

-Allen