The issue

Pear-group announced a versioning naming standard which unfortunatly failed to explain the reasons behind the decisions made. The aim of the previous standard was

• Formalize the version naming of packages.

• Fix problems with version_compare going from 1.0.0RC1 to 1.0.1

• To introduce a rule stating 'no-stable releases before 1.0.0'

• Solve release naming for My_Package2 (second releases)

It also attemtped to introduce a number of more controversial ideas

• Make the package status more visible.

The last one did not result in a complete consensus, and patches have now been made to the packager and installer to add state to the filename, output when installing a package.