Re: Reordering etc/NEWS

[Karl Fogel]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
> The one posting you have missed of importance is the one where Richard
> asked for volunteers that would consider taking over maintenance of
> Emacs once the release is out of the door.  I have no idea what list
> of candidates, if any, has resulted from that.  I also have no idea
> what candidates might have been struck from the list as the result of
> their way of voicing their concerns about the current process.  I
> certainly hope the list is not empty.

Thanks; sorry I missed that one, and I can see how it might make a
difference (although it's worth questioning the need to have a single
maintainer at all -- many projects don't, and do just fine).

> Richard has just announced that he plans on releasing Emacs 22.1 from
> the EMACS_BASE_22 branch.  It is not clear to me what should right now
> happen on the trunk, though: should the branch merges of multitty and
> emacs-unicode-2 commence now, or later?

I think merges of complex development branches can be handled
incrementally by using bidirectional merging:

   1) Repeatedly merge trunk into the branch, so the branch isn't
      generally much out-of-date (w.r.t. recent trunk changes).

   2) Get some developers to agree to run the branch for a while, to
      test for obvious showstoppers.

   3) One day, when the new work on the branch is done, merge it into
      trunk.  It'll already contain everything trunk contains, so the
      only new material will be the branch work, and that will be
      well-tested.

IOW, trunk always gets new changes, except when they might destabilize
trunk to the point of unusability, in which case a branch is used
temporarily to stabilize them -- after which they go to trunk.

So regarding your original question: what state of testedness are the
multitty and emacs-unicode-2 branches in, and how far out of date
w.r.t. trunk are they?

-Karl