Switching to milestone releases for 4.0.0.xxx

[jbalunas]

I wanted to bring this up at todays meeting, but ran out of time.  I wanted to start a discussion about switching to a milestone release format for out 4.0 release post ALPHA2.

There are several reasons for this. 

1) Beta typically implies functional complete, but we will not have all of our components moved over. 

2) Implies steady progress and in my mind fits the time-box approach better.

This would mean that the releases after ALPHA2 would take this form:

4.0.0.YYYYMMDD-Mn

YYYY = 4 digit year example 2010

MM     = 2 digit month example 02

DD     = 2 digit day example 16

n        = release #

For example:

4.0.0.20100216-M1

The timestamp is to keep it in order for OSGI reasons.  For reference take a look here: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossProjectVersioning

The zip files, and other artifacts do not need the date, but jars would.  Then once we get to CRn releases and GA we would not need the date.

Thoughts?

[nbelaevski]

Jay,

This looks ok in artifact file names, but what about JIRA version numbers? Will we use full version qualifier strings or shorter naming scheme, e.g. 4.0.0.M1?

[jbalunas]

This really breaks down into computer friendly with timestamp ( for mvn, osgi, etc... ), and person friendly.

We only need to use computer friendly where the computers need to care ( pom files, directory names for docs, svn tags, etc...)

NOTE: The timestamp is the date of the tag, not release

For other places I think we should just use 4.0.0.M1 format.  "Milestone" is too long and I don't think that anyone would be confused.