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