Re: bootstrap problem with union Lisp_Object

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

"Richard M. Stallman" <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     I'm not working hard on fixing bugs, indeed, because I pretty demotivated by
>     the never ending "preparation for pretest" and because those non-trivial
>     bugs don't have nearly enough info: we need more testers.
>
> That would be a good point, if not for the fact that we seem to have a
> person who can give us useful feedback now.  Yidong is working
> effectively on that particular bug.

I'm not going to keep working on this for much longer if there's going
to be no tangible result.  Even if that bug is fixed, I'm not
confident that there will be an Emacs 22 release.  Bug reports, big or
little, will keep coming in, there will always be something else to
delay the release.  At some point, either you have to say "we'll fix
only the critical regressions from now till the release", or the
release will be delayed forever.  That's the experience of successful
free software projects, such as gcc, firefox, and linux.  What makes
you think Emacs or its developers are so special?

The "fix all bugs" policy probably worked well back in the days when
the development source was closed to all but a handful of developers.
Nowadays, CVS Emacs is used by a large number of users, several orders
of magnitude more than before (effectively, it's *already* gone
through more testing than any previous closed-door Emacs pretest).
Like I said, if you're unable to adapt to the new situation, then so
be it; I'll be sad if Emacs goes into stagnation, but there are other
ways for me to spend my time.