Re: It is time for a feature freeze (it is NOW or never).

[Kim F. Storm]

Romain Francoise <address@hidden> writes:

> Please consider merging the multi-tty branch.  It brings a set of _very_
> useful features, and postponing the merge until Emacs 22 sounds like a
> real waste.  

IMHO, postponing currently available features that have already
been in HEAD for years any further would be an even bigger waste.

>              I have been using this branch for some months as my main
> Emacs environment for heavy usage and it's very solid.  

One or a few user's impression here doesn't convince me that it can be
merged without hazzle.

I have looked briefly at the multi-tty pathces, and although it looks
very sensible and systematic in its approach, it touches on many files
and interfaces!  

Since it probably hasn't received much attention (yet) from the core
developers, I would think that there are still some issues which need
to be ironed out.  For example , what is the value of window-system
variable if you have both a window frame and a non-window frame open
at the same time (I haven't looked, so I don't know how this issue has
been resolved, but there could be other issues like it).

Also, is the documentation on the multi-tty branch updated to reflect
changes in interfaces etc. (where it matters).

I would fear that even minor issues with it would inhibit a 21.5
release in 2004, and no matter how useful it is, I think it will have
to wait.  

Others may (and will) disagree of course...

>                                                         The only
> show-stopper is that Mac, Windows and DOS support is missing, but maybe
> this could be left aside temporarily...
> 

We are talking about a major new release here, so I don't like to have
"temporary show-stoppers" that will generate noise in the pretest.

There are enough new features for people to test already...

But I also think that as soon as we have branched from HEAD for 21.5,
it would be a good time to merge the multi-tty stuff to HEAD (with the
unicode branch).

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk