Yeah, it’s the way Blender works with the Master, though on official releases, the master is very close to the stable release branches, so the bugs from 2.93 are also in our releases though we work from the master. So.. most often every week we merge in the fixes from the master, meaning sometimes you’ll get more stable fixes in the devbuild, and still have the latest code that was from the LTS.
LTS may sound like more stability, but in reality it’s just code (with it’s bugs) frozen in time so if something breaks, it will be known and fixed from a development version that has gone ahead with more development (the master) – but it still is about as buggy as the master at that time. Any LTS fix goes to master on a regular basis as they merge any LTS fixes to master. So.. LTS stability bleeds to the master, which is what we fork from. So ultimately, to maintain multiple branches is like rolling back features and some new bug fixes and code that would ultimately make the relevant branch irrelevant over time, meaning any code to an LTS branch and fork we do ultimately becomes not future proof, nor stable when the new code is introduced into “LTS pipelines”.
So.. think of Bforartists more like a rolling release, where the Devbuild has the latest LTS code and fixes, along with the latest fixes still max 2 weeks behind bleeding edge Blender development (to allow for blender devs to fix things), and the stable official releases like an “LTS” with a shelf life of 6 months or so. because the 2-3 year Blender LTS branch is exactly that, a frozen development build in time with some showstopper bugs fixed (which we also do where possible.. ) – and these long term LTS releases will ultimately make addons and pipelines broken over time anyway, just with a bigger walls to crash into when you need to upgrade to the next LTS when the times comes.
So.. try out the dev builds, report where thing could improve. And the release we just did has the same LTS code as the Blender LTS 2.93, essentially the day we merged was the day 2.93 LTS released, meaning.. it also has the same instability. Now we have a few weeks of fixes merged in already with BFA 2.9.1, and possibly 2.9.2
What could be helpful, is reporting these bugs to Blender, and writing down how to reproduce them. So it can bleed back into Bforartists.
What I do recommend though, is use a single devbuild (latest) when you start a project, then don’t upgrade the build till you’ve finished the project. This DOES break things when upgrading mid project. But using a devbuild in production has the most features, most bug fixes, and most often can be the most stable release for production (till it’s not due to official release timing and a really big code refactors they sometimes do). Example, 2.93 LTS builds has known override bugs, known geometry nodes bugs, and many other issues compared to the 3.0 builds of today. I would not use 2.93 LTS for production with a stick, specially if I needed Library Overrides or Geometry Nodes in production. A few weeks has made the code that was 2.93 more stable today with 3.0. And this is the devbuilds of Bforartists today.
:dance: