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1.6.1 Stable Branches

In Gnulib, we don’t use topic branches for experimental work. Therefore, occasionally a broken commit may be pushed in Gnulib. It does not happen often, but it does happen.

To compensate for this, Gnulib offers “stable branches”. These are branches of the Gnulib code that are maintained over some longer period (a year, for example) and include

• bug fixes,
• portability enhancements (to existing as well as to new platforms),
• updates to config.guess and config.sub.

Not included in the stable branches are:

• new features, such as new modules,
• optimizations,
• refactorings,
• complex or risky changes in general,
• updates to texinfo.tex,
• documentation updates.

So far, we have five stable branches:

stable-202401

A stable branch that starts at the beginning of January 2024.

stable-202307

A stable branch that starts at the beginning of July 2023.

stable-202301

A stable branch that starts at the beginning of January 2023. It is no longer updated.

stable-202207

A stable branch that starts at the beginning of July 2022. It is no longer updated.

stable-202201

A stable branch that starts at the beginning of January 2022. It is no longer updated.

The two use-cases of stable branches are thus:

• You want to protect yourself from occasional breakage in Gnulib.
• When making a bug-fix release of your code, you can incorporate bug fixes in Gnulib, by pulling in the newest commits from the same stable branch that you were already using for the previous release.