Gosh, I haven't looked at 'stable' in ages and it looks like it's mostly unmodified since 2009, before the Racket days. It's still using 'mzscheme', which isn't even in my Racket 6.3 distribution on Mac OS anymore. And I no longer remember where we hacked Racket to permit mutable strings :/ I didn't see any diffs in ac.scm that might be responsible. Maybe someone else knows?
Hrm, perhaps it shouldn't be called "stable". That suggests a more-tested release cycle. Maybe something like "original" or "pure", or even "3.1-release"?
I like the idea of having something that's what was originally released, but doesn't really suggest that it's what someone should use if they're new to Arc.