A maintenance release is a release of a product that does not add new features or content. For instance, in computer software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

, maintenance releases are typically intended to solve minor problems, typically "bugs

Software bug

A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...

" or security

Security

Security is the degree of protection against danger, damage, loss, and crime. Security as a form of protection are structures and processes that provide or improve security as a condition. The Institute for Security and Open Methodologies in the OSSTMM 3 defines security as "a form of protection...

 issues.

Example of minor version numbering

The somewhat unusual version number "3.0.5a" was used for a minor release of KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

 because of a lack of version numbers. Work on KDE 3.1 had already started and, up to that day, the release coordinator used version numbers such as 3.0.5, 3.0.6 internally in the main CVS

Concurrent Versions System

The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...

 repository to mark snapshots of the upcoming 3.1. Then after 3.0.3, a number of important and unexpected bug fixes (starting from 3.0.4) suddenly became necessary, leading to a conflict, because 3.0.5 was at this time already in use. More recent KDE release cycles have tagged pre-release snapshots with large revision numbers, such as 3.1.95, to avoid such conflicts.

See also

• Patch (computing)
  Patch (computing)
  A patch is a piece of software designed to fix problems with, or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs, and improving the usability or performance...
  
  
• Software versioning
• Software release life cycle
• Point release
  Point release
  A point release is a minor release of a software project, especially one intended to fix bugs or do minor cleanups rather than add features. The term implies that such releases are relatively frequent, and is generally used with respect to open source projects being developed in the "bazaar model"...