software development process

[zwz]

It seems to me that ImageMagick releases very often, typically several releases each week. May I suggest adding a beta testing stage? Non-critical fixes and new features are added to the beta trunk, and only critical fixes are applied to the stable trunk. You can still release often, but this conventional software development process makes sure that the stable version contains less bugs.

[magick]

Our philosophy is even if there is a non-critical fix why not add that to the stable branch so any subsequent downloads of the distribution won't have that bug. We have had an unusual period of bug fixes lately but it appears to be coming to an end so expect longer periods between stable releases.