Re: Next release from master

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 17:46:02 -0800
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> >>>>> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
> 
> > Why not get back to the simpler scheme? "New work" will go into the next
> > major release (26.1, in this case), into master.
> 
> What about changes that should go into 25.2, but before 25.1 is ready? Where
> do those go?

This problem should only exist with externally maintained packages
that are then merged into Emacs's repository.  If such a package has
faster release schedule, it might have such a problem because some
change not appropriate for the Emacs release branch doesn't want to
wait for the next major Emacs release.

But for core Emacs, this problem shouldn't exist, as long as we decide
that a release branch gets only bugfixes.  With that decision, any
change that does not fix a bug should by default go to master.  There
are 2 major exceptions from that rule:

  . Some bugfixes are too invasive/unsafe to have on the release
    branch.  But these cases are rare.

  . Some changes that don't fix bugs, but are clearly safe, can be
    allowed on the release branch.  Examples include changes in
    documentation (including doc strings), and addition of packages
    or minor features that have no impact on the rest of Emacs.