Xref: utzoo gnu.emacs.help:1556 comp.emacs:10396
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unreplyable!garbage
From: donn@MILTON.U.WASHINGTON.EDU (Donn Cave)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Emacs 19
Message-ID: <9103230031.AA17379@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 23 Mar 91 00:31:30 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Followup-To: gnu.emacs.help
Organization: Gatewayed from the GNU Project mailing list help-gnu-emacs@prep.ai.mit.edu
Lines: 28

From: alarson@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Aaron Larson)
Subject: Re: Emacs 19
|             ... I don't think you can ask for schedules from people giving
|you SW.  However, negative schedules would help me plan.  I.e. "Emacs
|v19 won't be out within the next N months".  That way I can decide if I
|should upgrade minor emacs/epoch versions and port over all my extensions,
|which is usually not a trivial job.

Right on.  Frequent readers of these lists/newsgroups may sometimes wonder
"Why is this person using emacs 18.54 / g++ 1.36 / bash 1.04?  If they would
just get with the program and run the current version, surely their problems
would vanish!".  Of course to some extent this is pure inertia on the part of
the user, but you bet the uncertainty described above has an effect,
particularly at large installations where changes affect lots of people.  It
sounds like a good idea to me.  Hell, if something amazingly happens to get
done ahead of the negative prediction, maybe it can get run through a little
alpha-testing.

But, why have minor emacs/epoch versions at all?  It seems like this constant
drift of the current major version must take up a lot of time and energy, on
the part of the developers and certainly on the part of installers.  If there
are bugs, there should be minimal patches for them, such that they can be
installed without much fear of breaking anything.  Of course, the minor
version schedule currently used for most GNU products is quite appropriate
for beta testing, but emacs and gcc aren't beta testing.

	Donn Cave, University Computing Services, University of Washington
	donn@cac.washington.edu