Re: Reordering etc/NEWS

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: JD Smith <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 10:54:26 -0700
> 
> >From my perspective, Emacs is an ancient, deeply rooted culture, with
> its own customs and beliefs, established long ago.

I'm not sure what ancient culture and customs you refer to here, since
you've left them unnamed and unexplained.

If you are talking about long release cycles, then I'm all for making
them shorter, but please, even under the most optimal setup, don't
expect them to match those of other packages, even large ones, like
GDB.  Emacs is an extremely large package, whose humongous code cannot
be mastered by a single individual, or even a small group of core
developers.  Even if we confine ourselves only to the C code, Emacs
developers need to be experts in many diverse areas, such as Lisp
language, character sets and encodings, display, GUI toolkits (5 for
Unix plus 4 more for non-Unix platforms), signals and subprocesses,
and some intricate details of executable image structure (for unexec).
Lisp code is spread over more than 1000 files and covers even more
subject-matter ground.  I'm not familiar with any other GNU package
that could match Emacs in complexity and expertise requirements in so
many diverse fields.

So releasing such a large package will always need longer pretest than
most other software.  Especially since Emacs is maintained by
volunteers that come and go.