Re: FOR-RELEASE.W32

[Lennart Borgman]

David Kastrup wrote:

> Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:
>
>  
>
> > As Richard has said that Emacs-on-Windows problems shouldn't delay
> > the release, Lennart and I have been thinking of adding a file
> > (tentatively named admin/FOR-RELEASE.W32) listing things that would
> > be nice to have before releasing a binary tarball for Windows.
> >    
>
> Personally, I think really bad problems on Windows should at least
> delay the release of a Windows binary: Emacs is one of the most
> important migration applications to GNU systems: once a Windows user
> uses Emacs for his editing tasks (and utf-8 is increasing our chances
> here), he'll be likely to install the GNU utilities (MSYS or Cygwin)
> so that many of Emacs' external commands will work.  And then the step
> to going GNU all the way is rather small.
>  
I really agree to this.

> In my opinion, a good Windows Emacs is useful for getting people to
> use GNU.  That does not mean that Windows problems should delay
> releasing 22.1 for Unix-type systems, but I would tend not to release
> Windows binaries that are deficient.  Even if that means that such
> binaries will only appear with 22.2 or so.
I do not believe that minor problems in w32 or any other port should 
delay the main release. However we do have one major problem 
(emacsclient/server not working) and I think that is so serious that it 
should be fixed before release. Otherwise I think we get a bad 
impression on w32 and that does not help us reach our goals.

I would also suggest handling minor platform specific problems with 
platform specific "subreleases". On such case is the lacking 
documentation for w32 specifics.

I see no reason to handle binaries on w32 different than the source code 
there. Maybe you mean that we just should not make any w32 release until 
major problems are fixed there?