[tedsuo]

As you noted, even is the stable/production version and odd is unstable/development version. The goal is to get a number of changes in at once so that you can have a stable branch that's around for a decent amount of time. If you are making multiple changes before releasing a stable branch, how would you describe them? If they get libuv working properly, is that then from alpha to beta since it is now more stable? What if they then rewrite http.request and experiment with different APIs; is it still beta even though it is probably more unstable than the last release? Why not simply version the dev branch with every release, note the changes, and avoid the semantics?