Wayland Looks To Do Away With Alpha & Beta Releases

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 21 May 2025 at 05:16 AM EDT. 15 Comments

Ongoing Wayland release manager Simon Ser has proposed doing away with alpha and beta releases moving forward as a sign of Wayland's maturity and to ease the release management process.

With much of the interesting Wayland changes these days being to the Wayland Protocols collection and the individual Wayland compositors, there's been less activity to the Wayland repository itself. With the Wayland alpha and beta releases adding to the release management burden but with little benefit, Simon Ser is proposing they be eliminated and just going to a release candidate and then the stable release.

On the Wayland mailing list, Ser raised his proposal for doing away with alphas and betas for Wayland releases:

"With years passing by, development in the main Wayland repository has slowed down quite a bit, activity has moved over to wayland-protocols and compositors. However, cutting a new Wayland release is still a heavyweight process: it takes at least one and a half months with at least 3 pre-releases. I'm also not sure about the value of all of these pre-releases: historically they've been used to push the last features over the fence before the RCs, but it's easy enough to talk and coordinate over the bits that we want to wait on for the release.

I would suggest to drop the alphas/betas from the release process, ie. go straight to RC1. The process would then continue as usual, with weekly RCs. As a release manager this would help reduce the load. This is also what I've been doing for Sway and wlroots for a very long time.

Would this make sense? Are there other reasons why alphas/betas were valuable?"

So far no objections have been raised to this Wayland proposal.