Re: Why wasn't the 25.3 release based on the then-head of the emacs-25 branch?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: rgm@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 10:10:21 -0700
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > it's naïve to assume
> > time frames of minutes for these activities, unless we want to give up
> > QA.
> 
> It's routine to do the kind of QA that you mention in minutes for projects 
> Emacs's size. We're not up to that now, but it's reasonable to make it a goal, 
> if this sort of thing is important to us.

With the right organization and equipment available at suitable SLA,
sure.  But we are very far from that point, IMO.

> At any rate the procedure could be streamlined considerably compared
> to what it was last time.

Indeed, working in that direction would be a good progress.  I don't
think we need to get the time down to minutes, though, as that would
probably require measures that are impractical in our conditions.

> We could try having a better relationship with Debian and one or two others, so 
> that the patches they consider to be security issues cause us to consider 
> issuing new versions quickly. And we could be more proactive in sending our 
> potential security patches to them early in our review process.

If someone could take that upon themselves, sure.

> > Are Debian and Fedora indeed enough?  What about Red Hat?
> 
> Fedora is Red Hat's early version, so we needn't worry about Red Hat separately.
> 
> > What about Arch Linux?
> 
> They wouldn't make my cut. Others of us might step up to be a liaison. openSUSE 
> is also a plausible candidate for that.

What do others think about the set of distros we should use?

> > given the sample of distributions, how does one
> > figure out which ones of them include a given Emacs changeset, in
> > which versions of Emacs, and since what time.
> 
> This info is all public now, at least for Debian and Red Hat.

OK, so it would be good to have the pointers in admin/ somewhere.

Thanks.