Re: What is emacs architecture ?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Chad Brown writes:

 > For finding a `consistent set', you're really going to want to read
 > up on Bazaar first.  The concepts that you want here are `tags' and
 > perhaps `branches', but I recommend that you read the overview
 > first.

Not really.  In CVS you need tags for consistency, but in Emacs
practice in a modern VCS, pretty much every version accessible via the
VCS is going to be "consistent" in the sense of "intended to be
built".  Specifically, in Bazaar commits are formally synchronous
across the whole repository (aka atomic), and Emacs practice means
that will usually mean semantically synchronous (consistent) as well.

Of course, the OP also required "released", so that narrows the field
to tags (probably not branches).

Aside: This consistency is likely to change in certain ways in the
future, since I don't see a lot of appetite among Emacs developers for
Linux-kernel-style rebasing before pushing, but feature branches are
way too useful to be avoided.  So I expect that the mainline (as
defined by bzr) will appear as a sequence of usually consistent (ie,
buildable) revisions, with standalone commits mixed with merges.
However, revisions on branches merged by many developers will probably
be much less reliable, unless an explicit policy of only clean commits
in the public repo is adopted.