Re: Periodical releases

[Carsten Mattner <carstenmattner@googlemail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 9:29 PM, Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com> wrote:
>>> I would have less of a need to build emacs manually if
>>> there were more release and therefore standard emacs
>>> Linux distros was more up to date.
>>
>> The problem you raise here is apparently one of the difficulty/nuisance of
>> building Emacs.  It is not about how often to publish releases.
>>
>> Publishing non-release MS Windows binaries periodically has been _very_ helpful
>> (thank you again to those who have created and posted the builds).  At least on
>> that platform, that is a solution to the problem you raise.
>>
>
> It seems that the fix here is not to change the Emacs development and
> release process, but rather to encourage package maintainers to provide
> packages tracking the Emacs trunk.  The debian emacs-snapshot package
> described as "The GNU Emacs editor (development snapshot)" returns the
> following which is certainly many months (maybe years?) out of date.
>
> $ emacs --version
> GNU Emacs 23.2.1

This is one of the things which I always hoped Gentoo, Exherbo or rPath
would solve. Of those Gentoo and Exherbo seem to be the most likely
solution.

Fedora stable is a good way to get current software while not having
to rely on Debian sid.

Debian has the advantage of doko releasing gcc-snapshot regularly
as a nice way to check for future warnings in unreleased gcc versions.