On Wednesday 04 June 2003 5:00 pm, Matt Johnson wrote:

Hi folks,

I've googled this and pulled nothing. So, I'm writing my first 'application' in PHP. The only tenuous link to keep this 'on topic' is that I'm writing it on SuSE 8.2/Apache/MySQL/PHP. Could someone point me to what state my app should be in to constitute 'Alpha', then 'Beta', then 'version 1'. And equally, how do I 'number' it accurately to enable others to know where it's at on it's road to version 1? And as for 'release candidates'...

Is there a universal system at work? If so, where's it at? Or is it up to the person at the wheel?

It is completely up to you what you call your version, but generally: Aplha versions indicate a program in the initial stages, tested solely by the developers. Beta versions indicate a program that is approaching the end of the initial development and in a suitable state to let non-developers help in the testing. Release candidates are usually late Beta versions, where you think all bugs have been fixed and you want as many people as possible to test your s/w prior to the actual product release. As for versions, a number of schemes exist, but common ones have a version/release/fix scheme, e.g. 0.1.0 would be the first Alpha version, while 0.9.0 could possibly be the release candidate, and 1.0.0 the first released version (unless your company name is M$ and your first release version is 6 - cos the marketing folk say it looks beter).

Thanks for any pointers. All a bit new :)

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