Re: Periodical releases

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Chong Yidong <cyd@gnu.org> writes:

> Frankly, I'm not convinced there's any problem.

I can see two problems:

1) merging Org into Emacs trunk is a bit painful.  I'm still looking for
   a good workflow -- given the fact that Org is using git and Emacs is
   using bzr.  Any concret suggestion here is welcome.  I didn't grok
   Stefan's last suggestion.

2) I will probably release Org 8.0 before the end of the feature freeze
   (say march or april).  Not having it in Emacs 24.1 is not such a big
   deal, agreed, but it creates a situation where people often install
   Org on top of the one that comes with Emacs, which doesn't feel
   optimal and leads to many questions, because of conflicting installs.

Both are separate, and I can try to take care of (1) myself.

As for (2), let me refine my suggestion: what about a main feature
freeze for core functionalities and another one for big modules like
Org, Gnus, etc.?  The feature freeze for those module could happen for 
a *limited* and *known* period of time -- say 2 months before the Emacs
release date.

> Emacs 23.3 was released
> less than one year ago, and we are already well into the pretest for
> 24.1.  Doing considerably better would require resources we don't have.
> Note that all those projects that are being held up as models for their
> periodic release systems have people working on them full time!

Yes.  It should also be noted that things are getting at a very good
pace since you and Stefan took over maintainership, I guess everyone
acknowledges it.

-- 
 Bastien