On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Andrea Sartirana <sartiran@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Brian,
Thanks!
just one question, 8.3.* releases are declared as "Development Release". Which is the level of stability that we can expect from these releases? A.k.a can I deploy the 8.3.5 in prod?
Depends - are you Catholic or Protestant? ;)
I usually say that the release series are misnamed. They are really the "feature release" and the "bugfix release".
CMS, for example, usually needs the latest-greatest-features and thus runs the developer series exclusively in production. However, we also have a testbed set up that allows us to do acceptance testing before cutting over to a new release. Thus, the risk is relatively low for running any particular version.
Both series get approximately the same automated testing prior to release - developer series is additionally run in production at UW for a few weeks prior to release. It's expected that the developer series will have a higher rate of bugs, but I personally believe both have a low enough rate to be usable.
In the end, it's usually up to each sysadmin on his/her level of comfort, desire to run new features, and number of times they ran into troubles in the past.
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