Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle

it sounds like you are under the impression that the developers introduce new stuff for a .0 release and then only fix bugs for .1, .2, etc.

the sad reality is that they are introducing new stuff for every release, so there are no releases that are as stable as you are thinking they are.

on the other hand, as the kernel development has shown, you can get good results both for stability and for rapid introduction of new features with a rapid release cycle.

but when you do this sort of rapid release cycle, you really don't have a reason to believe that any release is significantly better than any other (without testing). how good the releases are will depend a lot on the testing that gets done on the patches before they are put in upstream. it may be that there is reason for a series of bugfix-only branches (like the kernel -stable series), but we'll have to see at what rate new bugs are introduced, and who is willing to backport the bugs for how long.