Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons)

This wouldn't be a general-availability branch, with an installation CD and official package pool and so forth. It would exist exclusively for developing and testing upstart (and packages' upstart scripts), and only be in the version control system. Once it matured to a release candidate state (i.e., it could work as is, but needs testing), it would be merged into the mainline, and only then would there be any (numbered, releasable) version that included its changes.

To be excessively pedantic, every single developer (with any version control system) has their own branch whenever they have uncommitted changes in their working directory. There's a version of the system that has different content from any other version, that diverges from the official main branch. It just doesn't have any infrastructure behind it, and exists only briefly (until the developer gets it committed/merged into the main branch). My point is that it could have a little more infrastructure (a meet point for multiple developers to share related work) and stay in this state for a long time (since it won't get lost with multiple people working on it and the shared location), and this would allow work on some topic to last longer than a release cycle when necessary.