RE: Periodical releases

[Drew Adams]

> Don't wait until "perfection" and release trunk more often
> with bug releases if needed. 

No, no, no, please.  Just the opposite.
Bake Emacs _more_ fully before releasing it.

Get it right.  Document it well.  Mention all user-visible changes in NEWS.  Fix
outstanding bugs.

Richard had exactly the right approach to releasing Emacs, IMO.  He was attacked
by some because they felt the release cycle was too short.  I, for one,
appreciated his thoroughness and insistence on high quality.

> Emacs trunk has never been unstable for me.

Oh.  So please continue to use the trunk.

It's been quite unstable (not to mention incomplete) at various times for
others; believe me.  And that's been true forever.  It's normal.  To expect
anything else is naive, IMHO.

> I'm even using the NS port and it's still stable.

So please continue to use it.

> I would have less of a need to build emacs manually if
> there were more release and therefore standard emacs
> Linux distros was more up to date.

The problem you raise here is apparently one of the difficulty/nuisance of
building Emacs.  It is not about how often to publish releases.

Publishing non-release MS Windows binaries periodically has been _very_ helpful
(thank you again to those who have created and posted the builds).  At least on
that platform, that is a solution to the problem you raise.

If the same cannot be done for other platforms then the solution would be to
somehow simplify the difficulty/nuisance of building Emacs on those platforms.

But in no case should that difficulty/nuisance of building be an excuse for
releasing the product before it is fully baked.