Re: Post-22.1 development?

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
>> Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 08:17:28 +0200
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden
>> 
>> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> >     FWIW, I don't think we should merge changes that are safe until
>> >     some time has passed and we have some kind of idea about how
>> >     buggy v22.1 is.  If the number of problems we hear on
>> >     bug-gnu-emacs is large, then we should stabilize 22.x before we
>> >     merge changes that can potentially destabilize it.
>> >
>> > We need to see, first of all, how many problems are reported in
>> > 22.1.
>> 
>> Why do we need to see that?  Problems in 22.1 will be of two kinds:
>> 
>> a) Problems that have a better fix or solution in Emacs 23
>> b) Problems that have the same fix or solution in Emacs 23
>
> In case it wasn't clear, _I_ was talking about merging changes to the
> EMACS_22_BASE branch, not to the trunk.

Hm, I was of the opinion that the topic of the thread was the question
what is keeping us from merging unicode-2 into the trunk.  Richard
suggested that we wanted to keep the trunk close to EMACS_22_BASE for
several months.  I protested, and Jason said that if there were things
in the trunk intended for 22.2, we should merge them into
EMACS_22_BASE now so that the trunk is free for getting unicode-2
merged into it.

And Jason said that 22.2-relevant fixes/changes should then happen in
EMACS_22_BASE and possibly be merged back into the trunk.  I disagree
here, actually: I'd start all fixes that make sense in 23.1 in the
trunk.  Merging them into EMACS_22_BASE would remain the
responsibility of the people interested on working on EMACS_22_BASE
(it would be the job of the Emacs 22 maintainer, whether or not that
is the same person as the trunk maintainer, to check stuff regularly
and nag people about putting them into EMACS_22_BASE if he thinks this
desirable).  Anyway, this is a detail where Jason and I have different
opinions.

Sure, accepting Richard's suggestion that we should keep trunk
parallel to EMACS_22_BASE and have a _separate_ unicode-2 for some
months, leads to the question whether to put Emacs 22.2 development
first into EMACS_22_BASE and then copy to the trunk, or the other way
round.

But I consider it a mistake to even ponder this question: when the
plan is to keep them identical, we don't need two branches for that.
It is just a nonsensical duplication of effort, and whether we copy
from A to B or from B to A while keeping A and B identical is just
smokescreen over the fact that we don't need both A and B if we intend
to keep them the same.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum