Re: What holds the release (was: mouse-1-click-follows-link)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 10:37:04 +0200
> From: Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> What *is* clear is that the current procedures do *not* induce
> speedy releases.

I don't think the procedures are the main culprit, or even an
important one.  What holds the release is the enormous amount of
mundane work to be done before we consider ourselves ready for the
next release, and the relatively small number of people who get
themselves busy working on those mundane issues.

> As discussed several times before, many projects, some with far
> fewer people than this, do just fine with forking to prepare a
> release and let people do new developments on the trunk.

It's not useful to blindly copy procedures from other projects, IMHO.
Most of them don't get anywhere near Emacs in complexity and diversity
of the features, nor are their different subsystems so loosely coupled
as they are in Emacs, and so demanding many different talents and
expertise in many almost unrelated fields.  There are other important
factors not to be forgotten: for example, the state of the
documentation of most other projects is abysmal compared to Emacs,
largely due to Richard's insistence on having the manuals updated and
proofread several times before Emacs is declared as release-ready
(which, of course, holds off releases, sometimes for a very long
time).  Etc., etc.