Re: Emacs 21 or snapshot?

[Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org>]

   Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> writes:

   >    Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> writes:
   >
   >    > Hi Mark,
   >    >
   >    >    As someone wishing to learn Emacs would you recommend I
   >    >    install Emacs 21 or Emacs-snapshot?
   >    >
   >    > You'd better stick with the current stable aka GNU Emacs 21.4
   >
   >    It is so much worse in utf-8 support alone that I wonder what you base
   >    that recommendation on.
   >
   > Snapshot is a development version whereas GNU Emacs 21 is a
   > *stable* version.

   Which does not change the fact that the snapshots have been quite
   better and more solid than the "stable" version for years now.  In
   particular now that snapshots are released as "pretest" releases.

For a newbie, I do not see any benefit in Pre-testing a piece of
software he does not know at all. Though I concede pretest
and/or even the CVS version are really good for experienced users
or people with already some GNU Emacs basics.

   Can you point to any area, even a single one, where the
   supposed "stability" of Emacs 21.4 leads to better results
   than, say, the pretest 22.0.99?

I won't be able to do that since I never ever had a problem with
GNU Emacs 21.x on a GNU/linux platform. Things are quite
different on Hurd though.

Xavier