Re: Rmail mbox-format branch

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Kim F. Storm)
> Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:36:20 +0200
> Cc: Paul Michael Reilly <address@hidden>, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>,
>       address@hidden
> 
> Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 09:56:16PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> OTOH, if we don't do this now, it will need to wait until a very
> >> distant next release.
> >
> > Will the next release (after 21.4) be distant?
> >
> > I was envisioning just moving the unicode branch to the trunk about 5 
> > minutes
> > after 21.4 is released, and immediately going into testing for version 22.
> 
> That was my understanding too.

I don't think it's reasonable to hope for that.  Experience shows that
21.4 will most probably be followed by a bugfix release 21.5, a month
or two after 21.4 is out; if that happens, we cannot move 22.1 into a
pretest before the bugfix release is out.  Since we cannot know
whether 21.4 will need a bugfix release, we will wait at least a month
or so before we decide, which again doesn't allow 22.1 to start a
pretest immediately.

Experience also shows that a pretest of a major new release takes
several months.  21.1 took more than 6 months, IIRC, and it was used
by more people before the pretest than the Unicode branch is now.

So I don't think 22.1 could be released before the end of next year,
even with the most favorable assumptions.

> If we hope for a 21.4 release in 2004 (rather than 2104), we should
> probably NOT do that.

One can hope, but I personally don't believe 21.4 will be out in 2004,
again based on past experience.  Perhaps it would be educational to
compile and publish some representative statistics of how long it
takes to get a release through a pretest.