"Harry ."
"Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.0.1, release candidate 1" was recently announced, with a caveat that "This release candidate in particular is known to suffer from a few significant issues which are being actively worked upon ... In the coming weeks we will continue to iterate on these issues. We will also look at Trac tickets marked with "highest" priority on the release status page."
This leads me to wonder whether release management know what the words "release" and "candidate" mean!
I would like to propose that the builds which are currently branded "release candidate" be rebranded as "beta", seeing as that is what they actually are. When the release manager has a build which s/he feels is ready for release, it should be published as a release candidate. If after a couple of weeks or so the same build is still considered suitable for release, it can be released as is, otherwise a new release candidate and testing period are required.
Indeed we do use these words very loosely for reasons that are largely historical. I would be open to changing the way we refer to these early "releases" if the current misuse is causing confusion (although not for 8.0, lest we spur even more confusion). I envision we'd probably have one or more "beta" release (beta1, beta2, ...) , followed by hopefully only one "release candidate" (rc1), followed by the release. Would this address your concern? Cheers, - Ben