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

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