Wow, I'm so glad we're having this discussion!

For clarification, the current stable VM is 5.0-201608171728.  And,
it IS stable.  It's one of the last VM's before Eliot made the new
garbage collector, so while it can encounter very long GC pauses, I
have rarely encountered any crashes whatsoever.

I've tried upgrading my VM several times over the last 18 months since
then but it would always frequent-enough crashes that it would become
too disruptive to project work.  With a new VM coming out every day,
at first I would wonder, "did that crash get fixed?" and I would try
again every other week or so.  But, it's time consuming to switch
VM's, bear the instability, and then swtich back, so after too many
failures I eventually stopped and just stayed with 5.0-201608171728.

Then, with the announcement of the 5.2 release a few weeks ago, I
decided to try again, so ventured back out to bintray try the "latest"
VM.  In this case, it was, 201804162229.  (See, we should not refer to
"latest" in any context of searching for a stable release, but only
specific version #'s please)...

Unfortunately, it didn't last very long before crashing with a
WebClient SSL access, so I was once again forced to revert back to
5.0-201608171728.

It would be so nice if we could include a newer VM one that is just as
stable for the release!  But...

>> Unfortunately, the pre-release VM has the bug described in issue #260: https://github.com/OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm/issues/260 .>
>
> Yea, i haven't had the time to fix that one.
> It's actually a plugin not the vm per se…

... IMO, it's a non-starter to include a newer VM in 5.2 release if it
means this plugin will be broken.

Thanks, Eliot, for Cog and Spur, they are masterpieces of mechanation!

Best Regards,
  Chris