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Contents 1 Proposal to rename article to Software release lifecycle 2 Merge from Software release 3 Old Discussion 3.1 Gold Master 3.2 History 3.3 What about General Availability? 3.4 Good article

[edit] Proposal to rename article to Software release lifecycle

I just tentatively named an article about what is beta version, how version numbers are used and so on as "development stage". If you come up with better wording, I will appreciate. -- Taku

I would call the page "Software development stages" or something similar to that. "Software" to show what it's about and "stages" because that the article is really about different stages, not just one stage. -David Björklund

I think Software development stages is a much better name; development stage can redirect to it. However, Software release lifecycle might even be better, since arguably there is a whole bunch of work that goes on before an application ever makes to the alpha stage. Complain if you don't want this, I'll probably go ahead and do it. --Chris Pickett 22:17, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, perhaps software release lifecycle should be created and then software release merged into it. --Chris Pickett 22:36, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I did the move, now I'll do the merge. One question: why does what links here show all these rock band pages? --Chris Pickett 22:03, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge from Software release

Software release as it stands would help make the introduction to this article better. --Chris Pickett 22:45, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Done. --Chris Pickett 23:09, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Old Discussion

What about POC? Proof of Concept? --84.177.217.156 13:15, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

I looked this up out of curiousity to see how the idea of greek letters denoting development cycles originated and where it originated. My guess would be "alpha" as in "first look" and then "beta" came after as in "after alpha" but that is just specualtion and what i came here to find out.

I've noticed that in recent years, developers have been doing less releases like "gamma" and "delta", and more like "-beta1", "-beta2" and/or "-rc1" and "-rc2" for testing releases. I personally blame open source for allowing updates to happen more frequently than in the past, as well as the increased vigilance of developers vs. exploiters. Can someone write something that details this phenomenon better than I could explain/opine? 68.100.68.23 03:29, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

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Needs and update re the Linux kernal naming. The odd/even business was introduced at some point (not initially), and have been (officially?) lost with 2.6 production where there is no 2.7

It might look that way, but I from what I can scoop from Google, they have every intention of making a 2.7 when the time comes; it's just that development has bghghhghggeen going so fast that a 2.7 fork would involve a lot of patches that are already being submitted for 2.6, which means things wouldn't get too far. It could change, though. 68.100.68.23 03:29, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

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Beta - a note on pronunciation would not be amiss. BATE-AH and BEET-AH are used by different communities and individuals (probably a link to a discussion - Hackers Dictionary?, alt.englist.usage? - would be appropriate)

I don't think so, BAY-tah is the correct pronounciation, as is the letter in the Greek alphabet. It's not that important to this article as it is the Greek alphabet. Totalirrelevance 09:19, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gold Master

I believe, but cannot yet source, that we stole that from the music industry, in which I believe the vinyl stampers were gold-plated.
--Baylink 00:11, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I've heard a sort of urban legend (which I believe may be true) that the original final copy of the CD, once complete, is made primarily of pure gold, for its reasons. So 'going gold' is when they ship off that copy to the producers. Totalirrelevance 09:16, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History

The first time I ran across the alpha/beta/final development stages was in early Macintosh documentation from Apple. But where did it originally come from?

[edit] What about General Availability?

I just wrote an article about General availability release, another common term for the "Gold" release. That article should probably be deleted and incorporated into here.

I put a tag to suggest a possible merger. -- Taku 01:11, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

I merged the two articles. Feel free to correct me if you think I did a bad job (there were not that much from General availability release to reuse). cheers David Björklund 13:16, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of GA, I had always thought a release that is dubbed "Generally Available" is exactly that: the most generally-available version, i.e., the GA version of PHP would be the version of PHP that most hosts have, and therefore it is the most generally available version of PHP. Have I been assuming wrong? j_freeman 19:21, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

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[edit] Good article

This is a good article! It is! It's simple, it doesn't drawl on for pages and pages and it's very explanatory! Crazy Eddy 12:19, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree, I love the chart at the top right! --Qode 14:54, 3 August 2006 (UTC)