Martin Brown writes about Linux:
<major>.<minor>.<subminor><stage><release> ^^^^^ | |
If this number is odd, it is a developer release (unstable), and if this number is even, it is a user release (stable).
Seems a little "hacky" and somewhat arbitrary, don't you think? After all, the <stage> (developer, alpha, beta, final) is intended to encode this information directly. The odd/even thing is obscure, and I doubt many people on this list even knew about or even suspected such a scheme.
-- Duane