Re: viper-mode C-[ behavior change in Emacs 24.4

[Hans BKK <hansbkk@gmail.com>]

>  "in production" (still unclear to me exactly what that means) 

These issues aren't so significant in environments where the user maintains their own system, but critical in organizations where a small staff is responsible for hundreds or thousands of hosts, and users are usually not allowed to modify their system.

"Production" systems are ones that are relied upon for critical operations, those that incur a significant cost if they stop working. These are often set up to run for years without any significant changes in order to minimize downtime and maintenance costs.

Doesn't have to be a multi-user host either, the CEO's personal desktop is usually treated as a critical "production" system.

To distinguish from "testing" machines or other hosts where downtime is NBD.

Marking a release (package, repo or distro) as "stable" usually implies the components-collection has gone through longer (over time) and more thorough (more people and platforms, in combination with more variables) TESTING. Newer releases are by that definition inherently "unstable".

Significant security issues are usually the only exception, their fixes often "backported" to the older releases.