Re: When will emacs 27.1 be officially released?

[Kévin Le Gouguec]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> I admit I don't see an easy way out of this situation.  I suspect some
>> users (the kind who use Debian Sid, Ubuntu PPAs, or any rolling release
>> distro) would flock to "nightly" tarballs and would not get overly
>> fussed about incomplete documentation, but that's just a guess.
>
> A decision to disregard our documentation is not mine to take
> (although I personally do have an opinion, of course).  It is
> something the community as a whole needs to decide, and then we will
> have to convince the Powers that Be of the GNU project; good luck with
> that!

Mmm.  I see that e.g. GCC[1], GDB[2] and Guix[3][4] put out "development
snapshots" fresh off the master branch (≈weekly, daily, and continuously
respectively).  Are they more diligent with documentation than Emacs is?

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/snapshots.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/current/
[3] https://guix.gnu.org/download/latest/

[4] (Also, that's neither here nor there, but kudos to Guix for
    automating the whole thing; AFAICT from the download URL, thanks to
    their CI system, it takes zero effort for them to (1) build the
    latest commit (2) test the result (3) archive it (4) make it
    available on their website.)

>> >                                                  Especially since an
>> > emergency bugfix release is also not something we can do quickly
>> > enough, as one or two occurrences in the past have shown.
>> 
>> I dimly remember that 25.3 sparked some debate regarding the difficulty
>> of putting out "targeted bugfix" releases as quickly as we'd like.  I
>> don't remember the conclusions; is there anything specific to Emacs that
>> prevents us from getting better?
>
> I think it was 26.3, and the problem is not the decision, the problem
> was how much time it took.  Too much, IMO.

25.3 was the "⚠🚨 Red alert! Enriched Text is insecure! 🚨⚠" release; I
don't see anything in the 26.3 NEWS that suggests "an emergency bugfix
release", though it's entirely possible that this one also took too much
time.

Here are some (lengthy) threads that the 25.3 release process triggered.
Off the top of my head, I don't remember if there were any conclusions
wrt hastening this process…

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-09/msg00401.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-09/msg00211.html