What is the best branch of github.com/discourse/discourse？

[xiasummer]

Recently, I encountered some problems in the default branch
“test_passed”, so I transferred to version stable. While I found that some beautiful features are gone. (Well, not very bad for that, but I’d like to know more about discourse branches).

Here is the active branches,

I’m wondering if there are some suggestions, like:

1. If your forum is quite aggressive and you want to feel new features, you can choose xxx branch.

2. If your forum is very strict always in good working condition, and you yourself are very conservative and don’t want any bugs , you can choose xxx branch.

[Stephen]

In both cases I would say tests_passed is usually fine. You can avoid upgrade problems by having a staging environment and testing your releases prior to applying upgrades.

The issues you describe above more relate to your own release processes than a particular branch of Discourse.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

We recommend running tests-passed and updating when beta releases are available. This gives you the flexibility of updating when you want/need to.

Stable isn’t recommended except in select cases… like extensive customization (99% of the sites we host aren’t in this category). There are months between stable releases, and we only backport critical or security related bugs… so if there’s a minor bug in stable you may have to live with it for quite a while.

There’s some more relevant discussion here:

Stable Release Channel

Security fixes are generally backported, yes. Critical (like, show stopping, unable to use Discourse) bugs are backported too. But many less critical bugs may not be. Backporting itself comes with risk, unintentional regressions can always occur, it forces users on stable to update, etc. Our general recommendation is that sites follow the tests-passed branch (as is default), and update when a new release (beta) is out. There are certain cases where stable may be recommended, for example a site …

and here:

Which branch of Discourse is used internally?

Our customers follow tests-passed, but unlike Meta/try do not update automatically as soon as we commit. We update customers regularly, but not on a specific schedule. We deploy customers “as needed”. For example, if we got significant reports about a bug, or the bug is just really bad, we’ll generally deploy sites as soon as we know the bug is fixed. We’ll also do a deploy after we finish a new feature. Sometimes we’ll do a deploy due to a plugin update, which also causes Discourse to be updat…