Why are multiple versions released at once

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To quote the Development/LifeCycle Wireshark Wiki page:

The Wireshark download page lists three types of releases: Stable, Old Stable, and Development.

• The Stable release is the latest official version of Wireshark. In most cases this is the version you should use.
• The Old Stable release is an older official version of Wireshark which is still supported. You may be required to use this, for example if your organization has strict software approval policies.
• The Development version is used for testing new features. Use this if you need one of those features.

although we now have the Old Old Stable release, which is currently 2.4.14. That one may be there for "enterprise" releases of operating systems that include Wireshark as a package, and that are very "trailing-edge" as a result of being an "enterprise" release, and still offer only Wireshark 2.4. I guess there are the really trailing-edge enterprise releases, but we don't want to support everything going back to 1.12.