https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40363
--- Comment #6 from Austin English austinenglish@gmail.com --- (In reply to Carter Young from comment #4)
Let me ask it this way: Say you decide that Wine Stable will become 1.9.5. At the moment 1.9.5 is chosen, is the staging patchset removed? If it is removed, our package in Gentoo breaks, as the staging flag existed before the decision.
1.odd releases are always development, 1.even is stable, fyi. 1.9.5 won't suddenly become stable. At some point the next stable will announced, with a code freeze, which versions become 1.10-rcx (or it may be 2.0-rcx, can't recall the decision at Wineconf..).
In other words, development releases don't arbitrarily become stable.