RE: Periodical releases

[Drew Adams]

> > But in no case should that difficulty/nuisance of building 
> > be an excuse for releasing the product before it is fully baked.
> 
> I don't mind building my emacs.

Great.  But you did cite "less of a need to build emacs manually" as an argument
why releases should be more frequent.

> It's a nuisance to have years old Emacs version in distributions.

Why?  What's the nuisance?  Anyway, you build Emacs yourself from trunk as often
as you like, and you don't mind doing so.  Where's the beef?

> To get a less buggy Emacs a better approach is releasing it
> more often so that there are more testers who wouldn't even consider
> building manually or install a prebuilt snapshot from trunk.

Bon sang mais c'est bien sur!  Ye olde cathedrale vs bazaar song...

There are already plenty of pre-release bugs reported, needing to be fixed.
Maybe when they are fixed you can argue that Emacs should be released to get
more testers.  For now, there seem to be enough people using pre-release builds
that give rise to bug reports.  More input is always welcome of course, but
Emacs users are not _only_ testers and fixers.

FWIW, where I work the default, prebuilt Emacs for developers on GNU/Linux is
Emacs 21.3.1!  And my impression is that few of them bother to build a more
recent version.  They are seemingly not clamouring for a new version, especially
since there are already 6 (!) releases available more recent than the one they
use.  (Some of them still use XEmacs, and apparently happily so.)

It's sometimes good to step back a bit and imagine that not all, or even most,
Emacs users are involved in, or even interested in, Emacs development.
Ponder...  Hard to fathom, I know.

Many, probably most, users use Emacs the way I use my car: just to get around
and do the things I need to do.  I don't work on the engine; I don't want to
understand the electrical system; and I upgrade only when the old horse just
can't make it around the block anymore even with a little coaxing.

Now I'm sure carmakers do not consider me their prime marketing target, and I'm
perhaps not a typical car owner.  But they really do need to sell new cars, to
stay in business.  They need new models each year - periodic releases.

We're not selling cars, and we're not even in business.  We're not in a race or
a competition for market share.  We cannot go out of business.  We improve Emacs
only because we want it to be better or we enjoy improving it or both -
intrinsic reward.  And there's no hurry in that.