Strange new release?

[marco]

I was somehow surprised by the releasing of a "new" maintenance release of the previous VBox version (which seemed to have been dismissed back in july) despite three releases of the current version having already been published.

Hence the question:
is there some reason why a 4.0.X user should choose 4.0.14 instead of upgrading to 4.1.X ?

[Martin]

I guess that there are commercial customers still running 4.0.x

[marco]

I agree with you (and thank you for your answer).

But why shouldn't they upgrade to 4.1.X ?

[Perryg]

Some people wait for the new feature releases to mature thus eliminating their possibility of issues. Plus commercial users usually don't upgrade as often as the release cycle increases.

[marco]

Some people wait for the new feature releases to mature thus eliminating their possibility of issues...

I quite understand that. I am actually one of them, despite not being a commercial user.
I learned to be quite cautious in updates (never touch something which is working well...) and I'm still happily running version 4.0.0.

What I find strange is the idea, apparently suggested by the latest release announcement, that upgrading from 4.0.X to 4.0.14 should be safer than upgrading, for example, to 4.1.4, which is not the first but the third 4.1.X release.
Safer to the point of pushing the developers to release such a... "late" maintenance release.

[Perryg]

This is a maintenance release of the 4.0.x branch. We encourage our users to switch to VirtualBox 4.1.4 but there might be reasons to stay with this older branch. These users will appreciate this update as some fixes of the 4.1.x branch were backported. Furthermore, VirtualBox 4.0.14 is the basis of VDI 3.3.1.

I don't read that in the release note. What I see is they suggest that you do indeed update, but if you don't they have backported some fixes. It is also important to know that the other reason for continuing to have the 4.0.* release is that the Oracle VDI 3.3.1 is based off 4.0.14. Which is listed as the stable release. I know that with lower number releases the inclusion of new features usually has its down side due to so many different combinations that we all need to deal with. Saying that I believe that 4.1.4 is as stable as any I have used.