The term
<emphasis>stable
</emphasis> in the name of the branch refers to the presumed Application Binary Interface stability, which is promised by the project. This means that a user application compiled on an older version of the system from the same branch works on a newer system from the same branch. The ABI stability has improved greatly from the compared to previous releases. In most cases, binaries from the older
<emphasis>STABLE
</emphasis> systems run unmodified on newer systems, including
<emphasis>HEAD
</emphasis>, assuming that the system management interfaces are not used.