= Proposal topic =

This is a proposal to revert the Milestone Adjustment Proposal (#162).

= Overview =

The changes outlined in [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Milestone_Adjustment_Proposal] shall be undone for Fedora 13, reverting to the milestone naming from Fedora 11.

= Problem space =

Many package maintainers have been confused by the renamed milestones, leading to delays and missed deadlines all over the feature process. (For example, the "NFS v4 as default" feature did not make it into Fedora 12 due to a misunderstanding caused by those renames. Other features were negatively affected as well.) It seems this effect was underestimated when the change was originally decided. Therefore, I think it is in our best interest to revert to the familiar names even if they do not match "industry standard terms" perfectly, also considering that the "industry" itself does not always use these terms consistently.

In addition, in the unlikely event people already got used to the new names and get confused again by the reversion, the worst thing that could happen is that they would deliver their features one milestone '''too early''', which is not a big issue.

= Solution Overview =

The following changes are proposed:
* Beta is renamed back to Preview.
* Alpha is renamed back to Beta.
* The original Alpha is reintroduced, as a way to get developers into "release mode" early and avoid bad surprises coming up during Beta (the current Alpha).
As the Fedora 13 cycle will be a full 6 month cycle again, we will have room for 3 milestones.

= Active Ingredients =

• release engineering
• package maintainers

= Owners =

kkofler (Kevin_Kofler)