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"This is the first stable release of the Tomcat 7 branch.".

I'm a little confused by Tomcat's version numbering:

http://tomcat.apache.org/whichversion.html

Shouldn't 7.0.0 instead of 7.0.6 be the first stable release?

MySQL takes this approach too. 5.5 went GA on 5.5.8 I believe. It can be a little confusing at first if you're used to alpha/beta/rc candidates but it makes more sense over time since you have a consistent numbering scheme vs. something like 1.1-beta2.

I'm not an expert on this but I'm guessing with tomcat being so ubiquitous they do an initial release of the new version, and then it takes a few revisions out in the wild for them to deem something production stable. I think its the equivalent of doing release candidates ala Firefox but without the RC label.

This is really a much better way to do it than the arbitrary silliness of alpha, beta, rc, dev, etc junk. See e.g. ridiculousness of python's PEP 386. Nice and deterministic.

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