Re: address@hidden: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

[Rob Browning]

Jérôme Marant <address@hidden> writes:

> Why would we necessarily have to go through this pretest phase the
> way it is currently done for major releases?

I don't think it's reasonable to presume that emacs-devel would want
to be as agressive about these micro releases as Debian.  Debian's
model is different, handling the testing *after* the intial release
via the progression from unstable -> testing -> stable.

During this entire process (of considering helping make emacs stable
releases), I've felt like this issue is likely to be the critical one.
It's possible that the emacs developers will want to be cautious
enough about all the releases (even the minor ones) that the overhead
will be too high for two people (who are already busy) to handle on
their own.  That's fine, and I can understand it.

The key here, in my opinion, is to find out what the emacs developers
*would* be comfortable with, then figure out how that would fit in
with the work we already have to do in Debian, and then determine
whether or not the impedence mismatch is low enough that it's an
overall win for everyone.

If not, then we should just go back to working on the Debian packages.
In that situation, I suppose we could also consider offering an
unofficial "branch" that just contained the non-debian-specific
patches from debian/patches/*, but I wouldn't be excited about that
unless most of the emacs developers are comfortable with it.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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