Re: Bash scripts in black and white

[Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com>]

On 2010-05-15 07:33 +0100, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> PS. Sometime one gets the idea that Emacs's developers do not test 
>> deeply (for example, with at least a clean bootstrap) their changes... 
>> This would explain why the bugs tracker is at #6193 :-)
>
> I won't recommend drawing any conclusions from just the number of the
> last filed bug.  Especially since the Emacs bug database is shared
> with other projects (e.g., Coreutils).  As another data point, the GNU
> Make's bug number approaches 30,000...
>
> More to the point: Emacs maintainers do test as deeply as practically
> possible for each one of them.  A bootstrap is a lengthy procedure for
> someone who has maybe an hour a day to work on Emacs.  We are grateful
> to all those who do have resources to bootstrap and test on other
> systems, and report results here.

I think users have much higher expectation of software quality these
days since there are far more good applications both commercial and
free. And frankly emacs is playing catch-up. The good quality part is
from decades of bug reports and fixes. Most recent additions are not due
to lack of exposure and due to lack of people care enough to report and
lack of people care enough to fix. What I know as truth is emacs may
hang more often than any applications on your system including the
webbrowser, which handles contents far more complex and it is making
emacs 'irrelevant' as time goes by. Let me cite one example here
http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/.

I also think it would be very helpful for emacs to have a daily build
report on one of the main platforms. This will help developers use their
time more effectively. To the outside, any breakage will last not more
than one day. Such routine can be automated. I have seen it done by
individual user and I have no doubt it can be done in the GNU project.

Leo