Re: Periodical releases

[Carsten Mattner <carstenmattner@googlemail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:05 PM, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>> Don't wait until "perfection" and release trunk more often
>> with bug releases if needed.
>
> No, no, no, please.  Just the opposite.
> Bake Emacs _more_ fully before releasing it.
>
> Get it right.  Document it well.  Mention all user-visible changes in NEWS.  Fix
> outstanding bugs.
>
> Richard had exactly the right approach to releasing Emacs, IMO.  He was attacked
> by some because they felt the release cycle was too short.  I, for one,
> appreciated his thoroughness and insistence on high quality.
>
>> Emacs trunk has never been unstable for me.
>
> Oh.  So please continue to use the trunk.
>
> It's been quite unstable (not to mention incomplete) at various times for
> others; believe me.  And that's been true forever.  It's normal.  To expect
> anything else is naive, IMHO.
>
>> I'm even using the NS port and it's still stable.
>
> So please continue to use it.
>
>> 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.
>
> If the same cannot be done for other platforms then the solution would be to
> somehow simplify the difficulty/nuisance of building Emacs on those platforms.
>
> But in no case should that difficulty/nuisance of building be an excuse for
> releasing the product before it is fully baked.

I don't mind building my emacs.
It's a nuisance to have years old Emacs version in distributions.
To get a less buggy Emacs a better approach is releasing it
more often so that there are more testers who wouldn't even consider
building manually or install a prebuilt snapshot from trunk.