Re: what's a stable release?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Karl,

About 
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Steady-Development.html>:
> Anyway, what's stable about it?

It means that these releases are mostly free from occasional regressions.

> As far as I was aware, Gnulib did not 
> promise any stability of anything at any level or make any attempt to do
> anything special every two months.
> 
> That is, I thought these tarballs are essentially a snapshot taken for
> the convenience of distro people, nothing more.

It's more than a snapshot: It's a 3 weeks old snapshot plus a merge of the bug
fixes that have been committed into HEAD in these 3 weeks. Thus it eliminates
most occasional regressions.

We don't promise that there won't be backward incompatible changes. But we
promise to document the backward incompatible changes in the NEWS file,
so that a user who upgrades from one release to the next can easily determine
what he has to change in his source code.

Bruno