[ESS] Current version?

[Ken Williams]

Rodney wrote:
> Well, that's two different things really.  If you want to see if 5.15 has fixed
> your favorite bug, then by all means.  Same goes if you are interested in
> seeing the new features of 5.15.  But, if you are looking for a stable snapshot,
> then you are out of luck.  Generally, the latest development version will at
> least work, but its a work in progress and it may contain bugs that have not
> been tracked down and/or incomplete features.  The released version may
> also have bugs as we all know, but hopefully fewer and/or only edge cases.

I think that would be a lot more true if the released version had maintenance releases, where such bugs could be ironed out.

Without those, it seems like little "real-world" testing happens of the development code, since it's deemed (correctly, I'm sure) too unstable to use for non-core developers, and any testing against the stable code doesn't result in bug fixes people can actually take advantage of in any working environment.

So it seems like perhaps the 5.15 development branch is perhaps serving two functions - it's the only code available with bug fixes relative to 5.14, presumably introducing stability; and it's got all the new features of 5.15, presumably introducing instability.  How those balance against each other is of course unknown.

Or perhaps I'm mistaken - does 5.14 actually change over time with "stealth" updates that fix any bugs found?

I'm not trying to criticize, I know it takes extra effort to maintain 2 branches of a codebase.  Just trying to explain why some non-core developer might want to try 5.15 if they're looking for something vaguely like "the thing that might work best for me right now".  And that if the dev branch is not considered suitable for testing in situ, there probably won't be as much testing of it.

 -Ken


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