Re: [jerome.marant@free.fr: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

[Francesco Potorti` <pot@gnu.org>]

>Imagine that 21.4 has been relased, and then imagine Jerome and I have
>made 21.5, 21.6, and 21.7 bugfix releases using backports or patches
>that were submitted to Debian, that have been approved by the Emacs
>developers.  Now imagine that you're preparing to make a new release
>from the "main" upstream development branch.  What do you call it?  If
>you pick 21.8 and then you're unexpectedly delayed for a month or two
>(for whatever reason), then we're in trouble if we need to make a
>bugfix release (imagine a data-destroying bug of some kind that can't
>wait).  We'd need something between 21.7 and 21.8.

Fortunately this problem does not exist.  The release number is
generated the moment that the tarball is made, so no provision or number
locking is needed in advance of the very last step of making the
tarball.

>Of course if you don't the possibility that you might have to keep
>changing the pending upstream release number whenever we make a minor
>bigfix release, then there's no problem, but even so, I suspect
>there's also some value in people being able to easily tell the
>difference between a truly minor bugfix release and one that's been
>worked on for (historically) on the order of a year.

While I want to make clear once again that this is a separate issue,
which is completely independent from the previous one, yes, I agree that
clearly indicating which releases are bugfix-only and which are not
would be valuable.