<https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C5UPMM0A0/p...

# arrow-contributors

[simon.vergauwen]

https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C5UPMM0A0/p1714132406591699

Should we do a .alpha1 release?

[Alejandro Serrano.Mena]

do you think it would be possible to publish `alpha`s for every push to main, as once happened at some point?

[simon.vergauwen]

Yes, for sure. The problem with the old solution was that it didn't really follow the releases. It published alpha instead of SNAPSHOT, but it incremented the number if we did an beta, RC 😕

I.e.

2.0.0-alpha23
2.0.0-RC1
2.0.1-alpha.1 // <-- next commit after RC release

[Javier]

That is normal, after a RC, solutions like Renovate will think that any other alpha published later will be older, but you are publishing that alpha with more things than the later RC

[simon.vergauwen]

I cannot imagine it's desired for most OSS projects though, and it has caused big issues for us in the past since alpha versions are automatically released and thus we incremented several patch versions by accident, and had broken releases on MavenCentral..

[Javier]

another solution can be having an additional branch with a specific commit with the tag as a marker for the RCs

[Javier]

But I wouldn’t recommend publishing an alpha that has more things than the later release, as it is not intuitive (at the end the natural cycle is alpha -> beta -> rc -> final)

[Alejandro Serrano.Mena]

the problem is that if we automate alpha releases, we get to the situation in which we release RC1, and then we may want to merge some fixes, which would lead to automated publication, before releasing RC2

[Alejandro Serrano.Mena]

maybe the solution is to work on a separate branch between RC and final 🤔

[Javier]

maybe we can detect that we are in the release cycle and stop publishing any alpha until we are again in a final release

[simon.vergauwen]

I personally am not too crazy about creating a new branch for RC ... That's why I choose to only do SNAPSHOT + manual tagged releases.

[simon.vergauwen]

We took a bit of a detour now though. So -alpha yey or nay?

[Alejandro Serrano.Mena]

I would say "yay" right now, because people is eager to try the 2.0 release, and alpha is the simplest way to provide those

[Alejandro Serrano.Mena]

once we near the 2.0 actual release, we can think about disabling the publication