[keyle]

I always cringe when I read the word 'final'. :)

Too many years in the industry with projects called final... Basically a tag saying 'this shit ain't never gonna be over! Run for the hills!'.

And nothing is more set in stone than a bunch of yml ;) /s

[pram]

Final as in it's the actual release and not a candidate, not that it's the final version of Ansible jfyi

[oneplane]

We have a word that describes that better than 'final': release. And if it's on physical media, you could even call it GM (Golden Master). They are not words that stand on their own, you would combine it with the artifact name and the version you are releasing.

Release of the following:

Name: ansible

Version: 4.0.0

Combined, it's the "Ansible 4.0.0 Release" in whatever order makes sense. If you have something that is not a release, then you would not call it a release. But if you think you are close to a release and you want to be sure, you could state that this is a candidate but not entirely sure. You can even have multiple incarnations of candidates. You end up with a "release candidate" and you could suffix it with number if you have more than one.

While many creators and vendors some up with all sorts of schemes, there are a few standards available with extensive documentation like https://semver.org or simply mimic what well-respected projects are using.

The problem is of course that nobody agrees on anything if you have a large quantity of things (including large quantity of people), and the urge to create 'a standard to fix the mess' which just adds to the mess in the end. This whole thing is of course not all that important in the grand scheme of things, and an intersection of the 'standards' XKCD commic and 'everything is great and nobody is happy' seems to be where we end up every time.

[kbenson]

I think the reason "final" is used is because you'll often have releases like

Foo 2.0 alpha release

Foo 2.0 RC1

Foo 2.0 RC2

etc, and if you just have "Foo 2.0" as a release it can be somewhat ambiguous as to whether someone named something wrong when downloading or describing it and left of that portion of the name, or if it's actually the full release, so they want a word to distinguish it as the actual full and final release of that version and not "the 2.0 branch"

"Final" may not be the best word choice for that, but it does at least accomplish the task of distinguishing the actual final product of that version from any other types of releases or the branch that will eventually become that.

[oneplane]

Final has a finality to it as you somewhat pointed out ;-)

Perhaps, the best option would have been to omit any wording:

release 4.0.0 would be the real version

release 4.0.0-beta would be the beta version

release 4.0.0-rc1 would be the first release candidate

Then again, words like 'final' and 'release' have too many meanings. Release doesn't mean version or 'no longer secret' but mostly 'available for people that just want to use it'. It's probably (like GM) mostly originated from the times where software versions required distribution management with physical aspects which makes 'release' have more of a meaning.

[coldtea]

>We have a word that describes that better than 'final': release.

The release would still be 4 even when it's in beta or alpha stage, so no.

[oneplane]

beta would be 4.0.0b or 4.0.0-1 or 4.0.0-BETA. But context is important here; it's not called final because it's the final major 4 version but because this is the 'release' version of major version 4 according to the mailing list.

[coldtea]

You keep using the word final. I don't think it means what you think it means...

Here it doesn't mean "the project is done, no more development".

It just means this is the official release of version 4.0 - e.g. no more betas, etc.

[keyle]

Well, I'm sorry it seems no one could get my sarcasm today.

I know how semver works and I found the final naming ironic.