stable vs. feature releases?

[Gary Funck]

Recently, I wanted to use this date adjustment feature described
in this circa 2005 email thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/info-***@gnu.org/msg33178.html

It turns out that the 1.12.10 release referred to above is
in the 'feature' directory, and not the 'stable' directory
on the web site where the source is distributed:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/feature/1.12.10/

That 'feature' release was built in July 2005.

How/when is the decision made to transition a release from
'feature' to 'stable'?

This is a relevant question, because various OS distributions
may employ a policy that only 'stable' releases are distributed.

[Steve McIntyre]

Post by Gary Funck
Recently, I wanted to use this date adjustment feature described
It turns out that the 1.12.10 release referred to above is
in the 'feature' directory, and not the 'stable' directory
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/feature/1.12.10/
That 'feature' release was built in July 2005.
How/when is the decision made to transition a release from
'feature' to 'stable'?
This is a relevant question, because various OS distributions
may employ a policy that only 'stable' releases are distributed.

To be honest, it's not clear that there's going to be another CVS
release, either "stable" or "feature". Waiting for the useful features
to get merged back into the stable branch looked like it would take so
long that for the Debian packages I just moved onto the feature branch
a long time ago.