According to the nightly edition guide, the 2024 Edition is planned for Rust 1.85, which will be released in February 2025 (unless it is delayed further). It makes sense to rename it to "2025 Edition" to avoid confusion (and jokes about an off-by-one error).
RFC 3501 establishes a rule that an edition should be released every 3 years, but also states that an edition can be released in another year to avoid stress/burnout of contributors. However, it does not specify how such a delayed edition should be named. I think an edition should always be named after the year of its release to avoid confusion.
The only downside I can think of is that people who have read blog posts such as A Call for Proposals for the Rust 2024 Edition will be surprised by the new name, but they will be surprised because of the late release either way.
I suppose, how sensible this is might also depend on the intended long-term consequence of delayed publishing of the edition, right?
If the edition comes out 2025, does that mean the following one will be 2028 or still 2027? If it's the latter, then keeping the name at 2024 will help a lot with memoizing the right name for the edition, because it's always (2000 plus) multiples of 3. If the following editions are still 2027, 2030 etc (and happen not to be delayed), I feel like the progression of 2015, 2018, 2021, 2025, 2027, 2030, … could seems more odd than having the stable release date slightly miss the end of 2024 [and the nightly 'stabilization' would still happen in 2024, anyway, right?].
I didn't realize it had been pushed back. What's the reason for this? Aside from the one migration lint that I didn't get around to implementing (which would be rarely used anyway), I'm not aware of anything that isn't complete or will be completed in the timeframe necessary for a 2024 release. It was originally scheduled for October to permit it slipping by one release and still being 2024.
I hate to say it to everyone who has worked on edition-related things, but at some point we have to establish a cadence and a hard cutoff. Imagine if we held ordinary point releases until things were ready? The rapid iteration of Rust would grind to a halt like many other languages.