Author: Luke-Jr 2011-09-19 15:00:54
Published on: 2011-09-19T15:00:54+00:00
On September 19, 2011, Gavin Andresen expressed his initial reluctance towards maintaining two release lines for Bitcoin's core software. Luke-Jr and others in #bitcoin-stable had suggested preparing the git repository and tags while they would make the actual release builds and source and post them on their respective websites. However, Andresen believed that testing and bug-fixing were the bottleneck for improving core Bitcoin and that having two release lines wouldn't help. Until they reached a stable version of "1.0" that everyone could agree on, using the word "stable" would be dishonest.The current development model had a problem where bug fixes occurred alongside improvements, and any code changes always had the potential to introduce new bugs despite how careful anyone was. Therefore, bug-fixes right now risked new bugs being introduced. There have been many bug-fixes since version 0.3.20.2 of bitcoind, but there is no stable branch. Thus, someone who wants those bug-fixes must either create their stable branch or risk getting all the new bugs introduced in the latest version.Having a stable branch like 0.4.x can provide people with upgrades that only make minimal changes required to fix bugs with a smaller risk of new bugs being introduced. A stable branch also allows people to maintain a stable+ branch with greater ease too. Although there are still various "must-have" features missing from 0.4, having a stable branch is beneficial.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T19:52:27.603738+00:00