Re: strange emacs 21.4 on ftp.gnu.org:/pub/gnu/emacs

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Am I the only one who finds himself very much surprised that even
> though he's a fairly active contributor and reads emacs-devel,
> emacs-pretest-bug, gnu.emacs.help, gnus.emacs.bug,
> gnu.emacs.announce, and a few more places, he has not seen any
> announcement (let alone discussion) of this new release?

This question is rhetorical.  The answer is obvious.  A slightly more
interesting question would be whether there is more than only one who
is _not_ surprised.

Answering the question is of secondary interest to answering the
question how to deal with it.  Personally, I'd like renaming this
thing to 21.3a even though Kim has already stated he considers it
unlikely that this might be a good idea/possible after the fact has
been established.

It would not appear, however, that either of our opinions would have
any relevance, anyway, so we might just stop musing about such things.

Given that, I recommend that we bother about what lies within our
power, namely editing Emacs, as releasing it is not under our control.
I propose that we now, where another renaming of everything has
seemingly become necessary, decide to call the next major release
22.0, and also fix all corresponding documentation and :version
strings (which are now completely fouled up) to refer to 22.0 instead.

This will prevent
a) us having to change all version strings again for the next major
release more than once,
b) us and third part package providers from looking like utter idiots
when talking about release numbers, in case another security fix
intervenes, invalidating all previously made statements and assurances
again.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum