Hi everyone, Given the past discussions to release one of more “milestone” releases along the path to TinkerPop 4, I wanted to start a discussion regarding the naming of the releases and the associated implications.
These upcoming releases should be official project releases (voted by the PMC) which are suitable for public distribution, with a clear implication that TP4 is still under development and thus the release doesn’t carry the usual stability expectations of a full release. The last time TinkerPop had such a similar release 3.0.0-M9-incubating. Up until now we’ve used the name “milestone” in discussions of similar releases for TinkerPop 4, however there is a key issue in that “milestone” is not a valid version suffix for python packages (https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/version-specifiers/). The closest equivalent name which is allowable in python is “beta”. To avoid inconsistencies in version names across packages, I suggest we standardize on the term beta to refer to any official (voted) release which is not yet ready to be a full major or minor release. These beta releases should inherit all the existing implications of past milestone versions, they are official releases of the project and are suitable for public distribution, however they may have incomplete features and do not carry any guaranteed stability. Note that there would be no changes to the existing policies around release candidates. Also, all package repositories which we currently deploy to allow “beta” or “b” as a version suffix. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns on this. If there is no feedback, I will assume a lazy consensus in favour of the new “beta” naming and I will make a corresponding update to the versioning section of the docs: https://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/current/dev/developer/#versioning. Thanks, Cole