On Monday, January 2, 2012, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote: >> > But in no case should that difficulty/nuisance of building >> > be an excuse for releasing the product before it is fully baked.
>> >> I don't mind building my emacs. > > Great. But you did cite "less of a need to build emacs manually" as an argument > why releases should be more frequent.
So that distros don't carry ancient emacs versions.
>> It's a nuisance to have years old Emacs version in distributions. > > Why? What's the nuisance? Anyway, you build Emacs yourself from trunk as often > as you like, and you don't mind doing so. Where's the beef?
I'd like to use the packaged emacs if it wasn't too old (for me).
>> To get a less buggy Emacs a better approach is releasing it >> more often so that there are more testers who wouldn't even consider
>> building manually or install a prebuilt snapshot from trunk. > > Bon sang mais c'est bien sur! Ye olde cathedrale vs bazaar song... > > There are already plenty of pre-release bugs reported, needing to be fixed.
> Maybe when they are fixed you can argue that Emacs should be released to get > more testers. For now, there seem to be enough people using pre-release builds > that give rise to bug reports. More input is always welcome of course, but
> Emacs users are not _only_ testers and fixers.
Not much to argue here.
> FWIW, where I work the default, prebuilt Emacs for developers on GNU/Linux is > Emacs 21.3.1! And my impression is that few of them bother to build a more
> recent version. They are seemingly not clamouring for a new version, especially > since there are already 6 (!) releases available more recent than the one they > use. (Some of them still use XEmacs, and apparently happily so.)
> > It's sometimes good to step back a bit and imagine that not all, or even most, > Emacs users are involved in, or even interested in, Emacs development. > Ponder... Hard to fathom, I know.
> > Many, probably most, users use Emacs the way I use my car: just to get around > and do the things I need to do. I don't work on the engine; I don't want to > understand the electrical system; and I upgrade only when the old horse just
> can't make it around the block anymore even with a little coaxing. > > Now I'm sure carmakers do not consider me their prime marketing target, and I'm > perhaps not a typical car owner. But they really do need to sell new cars, to
> stay in business. They need new models each year - periodic releases. > > We're not selling cars, and we're not even in business. We're not in a race or > a competition for market share. We cannot go out of business. We improve Emacs
> only because we want it to be better or we enjoy improving it or both - > intrinsic reward. And there's no hurry in that.
If we sold cars, looks would b more important than function. It's good this ain't a car.