I agree, the odd-even versioning was a separate concern from an upgrade standpoint. My concern here is different. It is that without "rc" in the version, a gem is considered by rubygems to be final. E.g., as far as I know, rubygems does not require '--pre' to install a gem versioned < 1.0.0. My concern is that while we consider the project < 1.0.0 to be a development release, rubygems does not supply a mechanism to explicitly convey that information to the user and enforce acknowledgement. We're making it explicit for our other packages by shipping them to our RC repos, but we don't have that option for the gem. We could just say that version < 1.0.0 is sufficient to indicate pre-release status and you're on your own if you install it from rubygems, but other than our release emails we won't have any way to tell this to users, who only know our software pre-releases by "rc"-based versioning.