Re: Reordering etc/NEWS

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Richard has just announced that he plans on releasing Emacs 22.1
>> from the EMACS_BASE_22 branch.  It is not clear to me what should
>> right now happen on the trunk, though: should the branch merges of
>> multitty and emacs-unicode-2 commence now, or later?
>
> I think merges of complex development branches can be handled
> incrementally by using bidirectional merging:
>
>    1) Repeatedly merge trunk into the branch, so the branch isn't
>       generally much out-of-date (w.r.t. recent trunk changes).
>
>    2) Get some developers to agree to run the branch for a while, to
>       test for obvious showstoppers.
>
>    3) One day, when the new work on the branch is done, merge it into
>       trunk.  It'll already contain everything trunk contains, so the
>       only new material will be the branch work, and that will be
>       well-tested.
>
> IOW, trunk always gets new changes, except when they might
> destabilize trunk to the point of unusability, in which case a
> branch is used temporarily to stabilize them -- after which they go
> to trunk.
>
> So regarding your original question: what state of testedness are
> the multitty and emacs-unicode-2 branches in, and how far out of
> date w.r.t. trunk are they?

They are basically synched to within a few weeks at most, and have
been used in production use partly for years and kept synched over all
that time.

That is the situation as I understand it.  The main concern is that we
have _two_ branches to merge, so there might be conflicts.  According
to the maintainers of the branches, those should be rather confined.
If one wanted to push one's luck, one could say that a first Emacs
23.1 prerelease should be possible a month after the serious work on
the branch merges commences.

Those branches have been slated for Emacs 23.1 _exactly_ because they
are in good state.  Other branches, like Emacs-bidi, don't appear
viable for a fast release.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum