Talk:Stability

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Include section on economic instability? --Daniel C. Boyer

[edit] Two kinds of software stability

It's worth mentioning that the developers of many major software packages maintain "stable" and "unstable" branches of development, in reference to the frequency of disruptive changes to the codebase (backwards incompatible feature changes, major refactorings, and so on), rather than any tendency to crash (or not). This distinction between feature-stability and runtime-stability (crash-proneness) can sometimes seem vague: experimental new features in the "unstable" branch can (and often does) make it more unstable at runtime than the "stable" branch. However, the reverse sometimes happens, when significant problems get fixed in the "unstable" branch first, before being merged to the "stable" branch at some later stage. --Piet Delport 15:34, 24 December 2005 (UTC)