Feature freeze (was Re: font-lock-comment-delimiter-face)

[Glenn Morris <gmorris+emacs@ast.cam.ac.uk>]

Kim F. Storm wrote:

> Feature freeze ?
[...]
> Can people please work on completing the release...

This prompts me to ask, when were the details of a feature freeze
agreed upon? I'm not trying to be provocative, but rather to suggest
that one reason for the continued delay is (IMO), lack of a clear
policy.

I'm aware of Kim's mail from 08 April last year ("It is time for a
feature freeze (it is NOW or never)",
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-04/msg00176.html>),
which was clearly very prescient in its negative predictions (sadly).

This was a "we *should* do this" kind of email. But where was the
official announcement, "it's been decided, we *will* do this"? In
other words, a widely publicized announcement saying, eg: As of date X
there will be a feature freeze. After this date, do not do A, B, C.
Instead, concentrate on D, E, F.

If I missed it, I apologize, but a quick search of the archives didn't
find it. Maybe there is some implicit convention inherited from
previous occasions, but I think Emacs has acquired many new CVS
contributors (such as myself) since the last release, and hopefully
will continue to do so in future, so explicitness would be good, I
feel.


Also, shouldn't there also be a new branch for the release?
admin/notes/BRANCH says:

    This is the "HEAD" branch, otherwise known as the "trunk"
    ...
    The closure process for this branch is undocumented; concepts such
    as "freeze", "release", or "integration with the trunk" are not
    applicable to this branch.


This is all water under the bridge really, and I don't want to cause
more wasteful discussion, so by all means ignore this message. I'm just
saying:

1) with hindsight (or with foresight for the next time round), a clear
   statement of release policy would seem essential. Maybe it would
   even help now to make a such a statement.

2) should there be a new CVS branch for the release?