Page History

...

After some of the planned features are added, a committer may propose a milestone releasebuild. Milestone releases builds are not official releases, each is just a snapshot, so formal vote is not required, only lazy consensus. They are may be tagged in SVN and releases are made available via informal mechanisms, e.g. a committers people.apache.org space. They are meant for testing only and not intended for production use, so there will be no migration scripts to help folks migrate data from milestone M1 to M2, etc.

Once a committer feels that the release is completely ready, he/she proposes to start making release candidates. A release candidate is a complete release, signed and ready to be shipped. Like milestone releases, release candidates are not official releases. They are meant for testing only and not intended for production use. After some feedback and testing has occurred and a release candidate appears to be good for final release, a vote is called. Once there are three +1 votes from PMC members the release can be made.

...