Re: 21.2.90 pretest, 21.3, 21.4...

[Juanma Barranquero <lektu@terra.es>]

On 06 Nov 2002 13:40:18 +0100, storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm) wrote:

> IMO, a feature freeze on the trunk at the current state would be OK!

I agree.

> So I suggest that we announce a date (e.g. Dec 1st) for a trunk
> feature freeze and make the first pretest for 21.4 soon thereafter,
> with the goal of releasing 21.4 no later than Mar 1st, 2003!

I think those are reasonable goals. Dec 1st for the freeze leaves time
enough for those who really *want* to include something in the 21.4 (at
least, if that "something" is not big, and if it is, it would be better
to wait for 21.5 anyway, IMO). That's four months of pretesting at the
bare minimum.  And we can always slip past the deadline... :)

> In my experience, the trunk has been very stable for a very long time
> [with a few hickups of course], so after the first few pretests, I
> would assume that the software would be stable enough for a release,
> or at least stable enough that we could make a 21_4 release branch for
> ironing out the final issues with the 21.4 release and remove the
> feature freeze on the trunk before Mar 1st (or whenever 21.4 will
> actually be ready).

Yes. I agree wrt stability of the trunk. I use 21.3.50 daily in my
production environment.  I don't remember the last time I had a crash;
many months ago. Several times I wasn't able to compile or bootstrap,
but if it compiles, it is rock-solid.

> Are anyone of you aware of any significant stability (or redisplay)
> related bugs that we need to fix before 21.4 ?

I know of two problems. At least one of them is Windows-specific, but I
don't know how to fix it: if you use w32-select-font and get an
*-iso10646-1 font, pasting it into the Registry
(HKLM\Software\GNU\Emacs\Font) garbles Emacs display. It looks like
Emacs isn't aware it's using an Unicode font. That happens both in the
RC and HEAD branches.

The other, related to some changes by Richard a few months ago, is that
the scroll line-by-line doesn't work when you're displaying the
ruler (or any other thing that makes Emacs show partially-visible lines).
In that case scroll always recenter the cursor irrespective of the value
of `scroll-conservatively'. It's a redisplay bug, but minor. Happens
only on the trunk.

> WDYT ??

FWIW, I think that any reasonable mesure to take the new features out to
the public light is good.


                                                           /L/e/k/t/u