Re: Bidi support

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>,
>     address@hidden,
>     address@hidden
> Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:39:59 +0900
> 
> I know how you feel, but doing things this way is either going to be a
> lot of work (synching "short-term changes" from the trunk to the
> long-term branch -- in my experience, people work on features like
> unicode and bidi in spurts, and they're pervasive changes so conflicts
> are frequent if you come back every month or so), or discourage work
> on the long-term branch (conflict resolution is enthusiasm-draining).

I merge once a week, for this very reason.  So far, no conflicts,
since the changes are limited to the display engine, where no active
development happened for quite some time.

Also, all the changes for now have the form

  if (!bidi)
    {
      old code
    }
  else
    {
      new code
    }

and changes only happen in the `else' branch.  This decreases the
probability of conflicts even more (and also avoids destabilizing the
stable code of yore).

Once the infrastructure part is over, and people start changing Lisp
packages, then yes, I guess the probability of conflict will soar.

And as I wrote, I also think the trunk should be Emacs 24, while 23.x
should be on a branch.