Re: Periodical releases

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:

> For what it's worth, Boost has no full-time people, and it releases four
> times yearly.  It wasn't always that way, though: for a while there we
> had a period of painfully slow multi-year releases.

Boost is anything but similar to Emacs from the project manager POV.

After using the development sources of Emacs for years with great
pleasure (it is, possibly, the most stable piece of software after the
OS kernel itself on any of my machines, if we take into account its
complexity and rate of defects) one is tempted to ask for more frequent
releases, as it is on a release-ready state most of the time, mainly if
we accept the quality level of other popular software that is well below
Emacs'. But then one wonders if that semi-permanent release-ready state
is not caused by the long feature-freeze periods which stabilizing
effect pervades the subsequent years of development.

The fact that Emacs is used by its own developers helps a lot to its
stability, but going into a permanent feature-frenzy mode probably would
cause a steady deterioration on Emacs' quality.

As mentioned on a previous message, IMO offloading some of the big Lisp
packages from the Emacs distribution would benefit the developers and
the users.