Re: EOL conversion of files in .tar archives

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     Why? This behavior has been present since before the pretest, and no
>     one complained; this suggests it is not urgent.
>
> Just because the pretesters didn't see a bug during 6 months
> doesn't mean it isn't a serious bug.

Quite so.  However, Emacs is _huge_ and growing.  If we won't release
it as long as there is any serious bug remaining in any subsystem of
it, we might as well strike "release" off the things we are ever going
to consider.

With a system as large and complex as Emacs, there is no chance we'll
_ever_ see a release if we don't cut off the attempts of fixing things
at one point of time.  We _have_ to raise the threshold of severity
for bugs we even _attempt_ to fix for the release in order to have the
amount of fixes causing potential havoc (and thus requiring an
extension of the release schedule with additional pretests) shrink.

It will be a huge coincidence (with no really important correlation to
the actual amount of severe bugs remaining) if there will be no
serious bug being _reported_ in any of the many subsystems of Emacs
for an extended period of time.

And that means, serious bugs remaining or not, that pretty much every
point of time is as good for a release as the next one.  In fact, I
would say that we are currently drifting away from the optimal time
for a release since the attention span for last-minute fixes is pretty
much over.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum