Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Phillip Lord]

On Thu, December 1, 2016 5:12 am, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> On 11/30/2016 08:49 PM, John Wiegley wrote:
>> if we can find some willing testers (and one has already stepped
>> forward). The only way your changes *wouldn't* land is if a better
>> alternative comes along in the meantime -- which, of course, would mean
>> we all win.
>
> What is the fundamental difference between merging this code into
> mainline in a disabled-by-default configuration and merging it into a
> branch, except that it's much more convenient to try the feature in the
> former case?


I wasn't going to comment on this thread, but alas here I go!

You launched the thread with "preview" in the title, that is you don't
think that your patch is finished yes. So, you are planning on doing more
work on it, before pushing to master? In which case, you already have a
branch. Why not push that up to the main emacs git? This would make is
very easy for people to test straight off the bat. I'll build and test it
on windows for instance.

I agree with your concerns that it will just moulder on a branch, and
that's true. There is a portable dumper out there for Emacs (version 21),
which is perhaps an indicator. But then disabled-by-default work runs the
same risk. No one tests it that much.

There's enough interest in your work that having it on a branch might even
contribute to encouraging more use of feature branches as part of
development rather than long running forks. That would be good, from my
perspective.

Phil