Re: patch vs. overwrite in bzr

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Thierry Volpiatto <thierry.volpiatto@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:35:34 +0200
> 
> I never understood why Emacs have not a developing branch to continue
> developing new features during the feature freeze.

Read the archives for past discussions of this issue, and you will
understand.  The reason is insufficient resources.  It takes a
significant effort to run a pretest, triage the bugs and fix important
ones, update the manuals, etc.  The extremely small number of core
maintainers does not leave resources to overview both the branch and
the trunk, as long as there's lots of work on each one of them.

People who want this to change should volunteer to do the tasks that
are needed to be done for the pretest and release.  Then 2 things will
happen: (1) there will be more people who can take a responsibility
for a release, thus freeing more time for the head maintainers to take
care of the trunk; and (2) the number of people who are familiar with
Emacs enough to become core maintainers will also grow.

> I think Emacs lost a lot a new features during this process, especially
> from contributors that send patches; most patches are lost or
> are unusable after several months of modifications in trunk.

If you use bzr or any other dVCS, you can simply put your changes on a
branch or even a shelf, and then when the time comes to push them, you
will have much less trouble than you think.  Modern VCSes do a very
good job at merging.