Re: Periodical releases

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Maybe 2 or 4 releases as a minimum per year with less major
> changes in each?

For Emacs-21, the main time constraint was to get the new redisplay
engine stable (with support for proportional fonts and such).
Can't remember any such large change for Emacs-22, off hand.
But for Emacs-23, there was a similar issue with the change to a utf-8
based internal representation and the new font handling.
For Emacs-24, it was the bidi support mostly.

These are fairly significant structural changes which are difficult to
perform piecemeal and tend to introduce significant breakage which takes
months if not years to test&debug (maybe partly for lack of a good
regression test suite, but also because of very complex semantics, most
of which is the result of accidental interferences between
"independent" features).


        Stefan