"stable" means that you're on the pre-release track

[lakruzz]

Current State

gh-tt is approaching an official release: 1.0 (target: Friday June 27^th)

We work by the Milestone: 1.0 which is our backlog for this plan and from there we lift stuff into the kanban - business as usual.

"Release", "Prerelease", "Stable" — How shall I navigate these terms?

A release

Is defined as a SemVer label with three levels of integers. Each level has semantic meaning:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>

Examples: 0.7.3, 1.0.0, 1.12.345

• Major + Minor levels define together the feature set supported in the release.
• Patch is and attempt to correct something in that feature set; a rework, a bug-fix, an optimization. But a patch itself doesn't add any new features.

A prerelease

Is defined to issue a release candidate. It is also a three-level-integer set but with a slightly different semantic meaning of the tail integer - and it has a suffix

<major>.<minor>.<sequence><suffix>

In this scope

• Major + Minor levels define the planned feature set supported in the release that we're working towards.
• Minor in this context is used as a sequence counter, rather than a patchthis implies that while working with prerelease we do not (necessarily) promise non-breaking changes or stable feature set. That relation is implied in the release.

An elaboration: if the current release is 1.0 and the planned release candidate is 1.1.23rc then it is actually implied that no backward compatibility breaking features are expected. (1.0 -> 1.1). But if the current prerelease is 2.0.23rc then backward compatibility has been sacraficed (1.1 -> 2.0).

Stable is a floating label

It's usually moved to indicated the latest prerelease

Beta and Alpha releases

Beta and Alpha defines the scope of the end-user segment:

• Alpha: Release to a closed, know group of end-users, who are all well aware that they serve as guinea pigs. Often the feedback loop is forgiving, relaxed, informal. We're in an ongoing a development process – far from feature complete. End-users knows that.

• Beta: Released to public. It's an official release, but the development team may issue a kinda we don't promise anything yet warning. Not in terms of internal quality, that should be (always) be solid. But things are moving fast, and it could be that even minor release could break backwards compatibility.

• Beta release are often identified my major level being zero 0 (e.g. 0.7.3)

• Alpha release are often a synonym with a pre-release (e.g 1.0.35rc)