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.