JOnAS Releases Life Cycle

Starting from JOnAS 4.2, the JOnAS release numbering will adopt the following rules:

The first indice corresponds to the J2EE version: JOnAS 3.x for J2EE 1.3, JOnAS 4.x for J2EE 1.4, JOnAS 5.x for J2EE 5 (J2EE has finally adopted the JOnAS versioning rules !).
The second indice corresponds to major enhancements, in term of functionalities or of significant upgrade of embedded components versions. This corresponds to what will be called a "major JOnAS version".
The third indice corresponds to maintenance releases (bugs fixing).
A CVS branch will be systematically created when releasing a major version (e.g. the 4.2 branch), and the first tagged version of the branch (so the release version number) will always have the third indice at 1 (e.g. 4.2.1 for branch 4.2, 4.3.1 for branch 4.3, and so on ...)
The current JOnAS version under development within the trunk will be marked (not tagged) with the third indice at 0 (e.g. 4.3.0 after 4.2.1 has been released).
In each branch, only bug fixes should be reported.

The releasing process for a major version is described below:

Any JOnAS version is always firstly released as MileStone, and announced as release candidate, e.g. 4.2.2 (some versions may have been tagged, but not released, as 4.2.1). After some period (one or two weeks) of beta testing by the community, if no bug is raised, the version will be promoted as stable release, else, bugs are fixed and a new version is released (e.g. 4.2.3). No stable release will be issued until any bug with level > 5 is fixed (or a turn around is found).
After a major version has been released as stable, no more version will be done in the corresponding branch, except some maintenance releases for some specific user requirement.