======================== Effective September 29, 2017 ========================== This branch is now in the Development Stage Details of what this means: The first stage in Cucumber's lifecycle is the development stage. This is where all the interesting development happens. The development stage is the only stage at which version numbers of the core packages are permitted to change. The core packages include the packages that are absolutely essential to the system's functionality (such as the Linux Kernel, Binutils, Coreutils, GCC, etc) and any packages where upgrading to a new version has a high potential of breaking existing packages, configurations and other stuff (such as Apache, OpenSSL, PHP, Python, Perl, etc). Note that this only applies to changes in the major/minor version number, not the release number. Additionally, the development stage is the only stage where packages can be added to and removed from the base and general package groups; the development stage is also the only stage where packages can be removed from (but not added to) the extra package groups. New packages can be added to the extra groups (and only the extra groups) post release, provided they do not in any way impede the functionality of any packages in the base or general groups. There is (generally) no set time frame for the development stage. New versions of Cucumber Linux are released when they are ready, not at a fixed interval like many other distributions.