Bart wrote:
2.7 branch will never be a stable release.
Eventually we'll get a 2.8 release.

I think that needs to be made to sound more deliberate, for Dennis's benefit. Please could any of the core team jump on me if some detail's wrong, but:

1.x is obsolete, consideration of whether it's stable or unstable isn't relevant.

2.x.y includes both stable and non-stable releases. The non-stable releases in particular include trunk.

Where x is an even number, it's a stable release. So 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 are stable, with 2.8 being the next stable release.

Where x is an odd number, it's not a stable release and should not be used for production purposes: specifically, it should not be used for compiling FPC itself or for compiling Lazarus etc. except as directed by developers.

The same pattern might or might not be followed by the y digit.

I think that trunk is currently 2.7.1. There are some things in trunk which will go into 2.8, others will remain in trunk when it becomes 2.9, others will be removed or left optional for experimentation.

There are cases where a developer will tell you to use a particular release (which might have a non-obvious numeric relationship to the current stable version) to get around a code-generation problem, but otherwise except for testing purposes you should stick to the even numbers.

This echoes the development practice of the Linux kernel, and is increasingly common practice.

--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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