On 1 Dec 2015 9:18 pm, "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>
> > > > (Why doesn't master hold the latest developments, just as
> > > > (IIUC) it has always done in the past?)
> > >
> > > During release stabilization, at least in recent releases that
> > > I can remember, the maintainers have asked that changes go to
> > > the release branch first and then get ported to 'master' later. 
> >
> > Except for new features, that is. The emacs-25 branch is for
> > refining what will get release. The master branch is still
> > the place where we add brand new stuff.
>
> This is a new feature, is it not?  Are we supposed to look to
> `master' only for an initial implementation of a new feature,
> and then look to an `emacs-N' branch for its post-branching
> improvement?

A few weeks ago, Emacs 25 entered feature freeze. This means a new branch called emacs-25 was created (at the time, it contained everything that was on master). Since then, any new features should go to the master branch, while bug fixes and refinements should go to the emacs-25 branch (these are later merged onto master too).

This way we can have several months to polish off the next release (on the emacs-25 branch) without forcing everybody to stop adding shiny new things (the shiny new things are just added to master instead).

The character-folding feature was added to master before the feature freeze. So it is now part of the emacs-25 branch. Any further refinements to this feature will therefore go on the emacs-25 branch (to make sure the release is as good as possible).