It seems people disagree on how to call their releases and what an alpha, a beta, an RC or a stable release actually is.
For instance I just gave KDE RC2 a try and I’m basically looking at an Alpha release… some features are missing, the product is not finished, no code freeze seems to have happened (or if that was the case, then we’d better wait for KDE 4.1).
Here’s how we name releases in Linux Mint:
- Alpha basically means “Developer Preview”. It’s a state where all features are not fully implemented yet and development is still on-going. With an Alpha release usually come notes saying “that part will look like this in the future so don’t mind it right now, just enjoy what’s already there”. The purpose of the Alpha release is not to be used or tested, it’s to give an idea to people of what the product is going to be. For instance, right now we could give you an ALPHA of the Debian Based Edition 
- Beta basically means the development is finished and we’ve reached code-freeze. We’re happy with the features, we know exactly how things should be and apart from the fact that things might not work fully, you can tell from a BETA EXACTLY how the finished product will be (exactly the same, with less bugs basically). Now, with a BETA.. the purpose is to get as many people to test the product so that we can eliminate bugs. It’s usually ok to release a BETA knowing there are already bugs if the deb team is already working on them…
- RC means that the product is now fully tested and we’re happy with it 100%, but for some reason.. we’re still afraid of some last minute bug and JUST IN CASE… JUST TO MAKE SURE, just to be on the safe side… we don’t call it STABLE, so that if something happens in the week or the week after the release… we can fix it and release STABLE.
- STABLE basically means the product is ready.
In Linux Mint we don’t release ALPHAs and we don’t release RCs. We code-freeze and fix all known bugs. Once we’re 100% happy with the product we release it as a BETA. It gets community-tested and depending on the amount and the severity of the bugs we either release a second BETA, or we release the STABLE version.
Since other projects are starting to use names for different meanings, I thought I’d make that clear for Mint users.
Clem
