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Weekend thought: What counts as stable in development?

From my experience it seems that "stable" is a relative concept. My linux server is "stable" in the sense that the packages are tested for a long period of time before release, but my home distro is a rolling release and that is also stable in my opinion. So which is it? Can it be both? Or maybe we're just lying to ourselves that anything is stable.

When I'm developing web applications I always have this rule that is the user can't enter and exit the application without a major error coming out, it isn't ready for production. Once that's out of the way, from my point of view the application is stable. But if I were to present this to a company would they think the same? Probably not.

What do you think counts as a stable production release?

Comments
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    Stable for dev/personal use and stable for production are 2 entirely different concepts, I think.

    For instance if my work computer gets so utterly utterly messed up that I can't work on it, then I can just reinstall Linux, and be up and running before anyone knows anything is amiss. Certainly, no clients would ever know it happened.

    But if production goes down for even 60 seconds unscheduled, it's a pretty big deal! We lose customers, everyone in the company gets concerned, and it just reflects so badly on the dev dept.
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