Re: bootstrap problem with union Lisp_Object

[Chong Yidong]

"Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:

>     I don't see why those things need to all be fixed before we start
>     the pretest.
>
> Because we aim to make a release with all known bugs fixed.
> It makes no sense to postpone debugging the bugs we know about
> in order to discover more bugs.

That is illogical.  If we're going to discover more bugs, it is better
to do it earlier than later.  You're implying that the Emacs
developers are all busy fixing bugs.  I don't think this is accurate.

In fact, the main thing holding the release (by your
fix-every-known-bug criteria) is the string_free_list issue.  So far,
the only way we have of debugging this is exchanging emails with the
only user currently known to experience the crash.  This is an
inherently slow process, and in the meantime we're sitting around
twiddling our thumbs -- exactly the opposite scenario!

Holding the pretest will not help resolve the string_free_list bug.
On the contrary; if we started the pretest now, there would at least
be a few more bug reports coming in, which can be worked on in the
meantime, bringing us closer to the release.

(The short way of saying this is that bug-fixing takes place in
parallel, not in series.)