Re: On Contributing To Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:52:12 +1100
> 
> Releasing once every 12 months would be OK if we have the resources
> to achieve that, but I think for the core Emacs release, every 24
> months is quite reasonable (though, I also remember a time when new
> Emacs versions took multiple years, so current release cycles seem
> pretty speedy compared to pre-20).

Yes, we've sped up the release cycle to some extent by enforcing the
rule that minor releases have no new features much more stringently
than it was before Emacs 26, and by using release branches in more
orderly fashion.

As for the relatively long release cycle in general, I said in the
past that many people don't realize the difficulty of releasing a
large, versatile, and stable package such as Emacs.  It is not enough
to make sure that just the new features are working, we also need to
make sure that everything that worked before is still working, and
that is a huge job that takes time, due to disparate use patterns.  It
doesn't help that Emacs is an interactive program, which means a test
suite can only go that far in helping with discovering regressions.
So the experience people have in releasing much smaller and/or less
versatile and/or less interactive packages doesn't scale well when
applied to Emacs.