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Tue Feb 28 01:30:59 CET 2012 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2012-February/117017.html

Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 2/27/2012 6:50 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> 
>> 'rc' makes sense to most people while 'c' is generally unheard of.
> 
> 'rc' following 'a' and 'b' only makes sense to people who are used to it 
> and know what it means. 'c' for 'candidate' makes more sense to me both 
> a decade ago and now. 'rc' is inconsistent. Why not 'ra' for 'release 
> alpha' or 'ar' for 'alpha release'? In other words, all releases are 
> releases, so why not be consistent and either always or never include 
> 'r'? (Never would be better since always is redundant.)
> 
> I suspect many non-developer users find 'rc' as surprising as I did.

Yes, but you should only find it surprising *once*, the first time you learn 
about the standard release schedule:

pre-alpha
alpha
beta
release candidate
production release

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle

Not all releases are equivalent. In English, we can not only verbify nouns, 
but we can also nounify verbs. So, yes, any software which is released is *a* 
release; but only the last, production-ready release is *the* release. The 
others are pre-release releases.

Ain't English grand?

If if you prefer a more wordy but slightly less confusing way of saying it, 
they are pre-release versions which have been released.

This reply of mine on the python-list list may also be relevant:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-February/1288569.html

-- 
Steven

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[Python-Dev] Marking packaging-related PEPs as Finished after fixing some bugs in them