Re: Overlay arrow in *compilation* and *grep* buffers

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Nick Roberts <nickrob@snap.net.nz>
> Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 19:18:37 +1200
> Cc: Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>  > PLEASE do not propose new options until we cut the release branch and
>  > go into pretest.  We will NEVER release another Emacs this way!
> 
> I don't follow this logic. Presumably the only thing that will bring the
> pretest forward is completing the items in FOR-RELEASE. Small changes like
> this aren't holding it up and may improve the final release.

The logic is that any work that is not necessary for finishing the
FOR-RELEASE items is wasting time of the core developers, and thus
postpones the pretest and the release, because those developers have
less time to work on FOR-RELEASE items.

If someone doesn't want to work on the manuals or on other FOR-RELEASE
items, fine; but at least they should not bring up new features,
especially those which affect widely used commands or packages,
because such changes tend to provoke long disputes, destabilize Emacs
and introduce bugs and misfeatures that drag many other developers
into discussions, suggestions for how to fix what became broken,
fixing them, debugging the fix for the fix, etc.

We've been through this time and again.  Some recent examples include
the overlay arrow in compilation buffers, font-lock changes wrt
comment delimiters, ispell vs aspell invocation, etc.  How many more
such incidents are needed before people will understand that THERE ARE
NO SMALL CHANGES before a release?