Re: Question about intended behavior of 'insert-for-yank-1'.

[Karl Fogel]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>> The "Branches" section in CONTRIBUTE makes a distinction between
>> "development" and "bug fixes".  I think of this change as more of a
>> background improvement -- of the sort that just needs to get into
>> Emacs eventually -- than as a bug fix of the sort meant by
>> CONTRIBUTE.  However, your mail implies that CONTRIBUTE means to
>> include this sort of thing in the category "bug fix" too.  You
>> probably have a better handle on the intentions behind the language
>> in CONTRIBUTE than I do, so I'll re-interpret that section
>> accordingly.
>
>You need to understand the logic behind the instructions in
>CONTRIBUTE: the release branch should only get fixes that are either
>necessary, or are safe, i.e. cannot possibly break the release.  And
>doc changes obviously belong to this latter class.

I understand that logic.  However, do you mean s/only/always/ above?

The question is whether it is wrong to commit it to master instead, not whether 
it would have been right to commit it to emacs-25.  A non-urgent doc fix that 
lands on master will eventually "get into Emacs", when new release lines are 
created.  This was good enough for me.

You seem to be saying that, once the safe doc fix is available, it should 
always be committed to the current release branch.  For the committer, this 
would add the mental overhead of figuring out whether or not a particular 
release branch is in a freeze state or not.  This is actually non-trivial to 
figure out, since it's not maintained as a visible flag in some designated 
place, but rather as a thread on the mailing list, which I then have to go 
search for.

So for non-urgent stuff like this, I find it easier to just commit to master, 
because then I don't have to worry about the state of the current release 
branch.  I can start worrying about it, if you think it's important.  I just 
wanted to clarify why I aimed this change at master, and to see if my 
explanation affects the course of action you recommend for situations like 
this.  (When I want a fix to go into the current release, then I expend the 
extra effort to determine whether I can put it on the release branch.)

Now, *maybe* it is the case that a super-safe change like this is allowed onto 
a release branch even when that branch is frozen.  But I don't know that for 
sure, and CONTRIBUTE doesn't say.  Maybe this is just a doc bug in CONTRIBUTE 
and we should fix it.

IOW, committing to master wasn't an accident; it resulted from a balancing of 
priorities.

>I added a sentence about doc fixes to CONTRIBUTE.

That will help either way.  Thank you.

Best regards,
-Karl