Re: [Distutils] Is there an official stable release of setuptools?

Dave Peterson wrote:

However, there are others who think 'stable' just means that we've found, in our own testing, that things generally work as advertised and that really, our build process is building correctly.

I think you'll find that this is how most software packagers (check any Linux distribution) do it, after the package has been in the testing or unstable branch for a reasonable amount of time. Also, you may find you have to mark a pre-alpha package stable the day it's released if the previous stable version has a serious security issue.