Sylvain Wallez wrote:

I don't have a strong opinion on this, except that I don't think that the term milestone doesn't fit very well for us because this would imply that we have like e.g. Eclipse a well-defined roadmap. And as we all know, that's simply not the case.

I'm also fine with 3.0-alpha-1, etc. and, see the reasons below, it's probably better to change the proposal into this direction.

We had three possible routes for Corona:

1) Develop Corona outside of the Cocoon project (e.g. Google, Sourceforge, etc.) 2) Find some alternative name and release it under this codename. 3) Release it as Cocoon 3.0-alpha-x

1) would have been really dangerous IMO. What would people have thought if the former PMC chair created an alternative project that is a reimplementation of Cocoon outside of the oversight of the Cocoon PMC. And that just a few months after his resignation.

2) Many people advised not to invent another codename. Also the name finding game wasn't really successful. Personally I'm not willing to invest any more time into this.

3) Releasing 3.0 comes with the risk that 3.0 never takes off and doesn't attract a broader developer and user community. But as long as we only release alpha software, we can even do a re-rewrite.

Regarding your "too early announced" argument, I'm not so pessimistic. Most people very well understand the difference between production quality and alpha software and that alpha software is no guarantee for anything (time, quality/stability, community). Addtionally we will add warnings to all download pages, READMEs and also adding "alpha" helps.

Also other projects demonstrate that having an alpha branch doesn't make most people wait for the final release of the alpha branch (see Tomcat, Jetty, Maven, httpd, etc.). And if you have time to wait, I don't think that you really have to solve a problem.