It is time for a feature freeze (it is NOW or never).

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org> writes:

> Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:
> 
> > I think Unicode branch is fairly usable in normal use.  At
> > least it's stable enough for my daily work.  But if it is
> > used with third party packages, I think some of them must be
> > adjusted for emacs-unicode.
> 
> I used HEAD for several months, and have since switched to the unicode
> branch for several months.  I still experience a crash or two a month,
> which is bad, but I cannot say I noticed any difference between the
> two.
> 
> I must confess, however, that I have hoped all this time that the bidi
> branch would be merged into the unicode branch, and that we'd release
> the stuff as Emacs 22...  Even fickle Arabic and Hebrew support is
> better than no support at all...  And for all it's worth, I've used
> the bidi branch for IRC as well!  :)

I also think that unicode and bidi belongs in 22.1 => which is why
they should NOT be merged at this time.

I suggest that we make a complete feature freeze on HEAD for 21.4 NOW !!!

Thus, we allow just bug fixes, and minor adjustments to new features
(in case current interface/implementation is sub-optimal or unclean).

Eg. if there are still some issues with the new compile.el, do 
whatever is necessary to fix them.

New packages that we have already decided to add may also still go in.

And of course, we should get the remaining documentation tasks done
(getting new stuff in NEWS into the manuals).

Besides that, our efforts should concentrate on ironing out the (few?)
remaning unsolved reports about crashes in CVS head.

We should aim at doing the first pre-test in approx. 1 month (no later
than June 1st).

WHY?

Current HEAD is rock-solid for normal use, and I don't think it will
can be much better in that respect (but we should try!).  I suppose we
have all used it in our daily work for [too] many months already, and
so have numerous anonymous users who need - or just like - the new
features of 21.4.

Also, people (notably Luc) have spent quite some time proof-reading
the current documentation on HEAD, so docs are also in a pretty
consistent state.


Consequently, we should be able to have an expedited pre-test phase,
as many parts of the code has already received extensive testing by a
much broader audience than any previous pre-test versions of emacs.


If we don't do it now, and start merging unicode and bidi to HEAD, I
fear that a 22.1 release is at least 1 year further into the future --
and that CVS HEAD will go through a phase of lesser stable code than
we have been used to for quite some time (I'm not judging the quality
of the code on those branches, it's just that it hasn't been tested to
the same extent as HEAD, so we should expect problems).


It's time!!!

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk