Production servers, or any server where you have users, should always track Galaxy-dist.

Galaxy-central is a development repo (you get access to the "latest and greatest", but also should Expect more bugs to pop up at any given time), from the Galaxy-central header on bitbucket: "Main development repository for Galaxy. Active development happens here, and this repository is thus intended for those working on Galaxy development. See http://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-dist/ for a more stable repository intended for end-users."

Its really a personal choice that each (tool) developer will have to make based upon whether they consider themselves to be a pure end-user (just adding tools or running a Galaxy server) who only wants to work on a "stable" branch; or if they want to contribute to Core development or gain early access to development features (and bugs).  I would say that finalized tools and e.g. tools submitted to the tool shed should be vetted against galaxy-dist.

Thanks for using Galaxy,

Dan