Re: [jerome.marant@free.fr: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, jmarant@free.fr
> From: Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>
> Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:15:06 -0500
> 
> So the presumption was that there won't be more than about 50 bugfixes
> before the next "primary release".

Yes.

In my experience, most pretest versions started from .80, with some
major ones beginning at .70.

> To a large extent how many bugfix releases we could make in a year or
> so will depend on how the developers want to handle the "bugfix only"
> testing process.  Will it be the same process as for a "bigger"
> release, or can it be handled differently since the changes allowed
> are much more restricted?

I don't think it matters: in any case, it takes a non-trivial amount
of time to run a pretest.

One related problem is that AFAIK we have no clear criteria for when a
version, be it bugfix or major, is ready for a release.

> (In Debian, we normally release a new package as soon as we have a
>  fix, it goes to unstable, and then it waits there for a time.  If
>  "nothing goes wrong" with it or anything it depends on during that
>  time, then that package migrates to testing for eventual inclusion in
>  our next stable release.)

I think Emacs is such a large package that it doesn't make sense to
have a new version more than once in a month or two.  But that, too,
was never discussed nor codified since we never could end a pretest as
soon as that.  Perhaps we should delay this discussion until we get to
such a situation for the first time.