Release plans [was: Building packages with 21.5b29?]

Michael Sperber writes: If anybody wants to start publishing "top ten bugs that must be fixed for the release" or "top ten features that should be completed for the release" lists, that would be a good start. But we don't even have those lists yet; talking about a release plan is way premature IMHO, especially with the only person regularly contributing patches being Aidan, and the work he's doing is not useful in moving toward a release IMO. (That is not to say I think Aidan "should" do something else; just that we need more promises of manpower, and a do-able list of tasks to apply it to, before thinking about schedules and such.) Nor do I think it's *my* place to mandate any particular lists. Some of the things I want to work on are definitely unnecessary; some of the things I think *are* high priority I'm not able/willing to volunteer to do. I don't see any point in merging the GPLv3 stuff and immediately forking off a public release branch. There are too many desirable features that are just plain unusable (Xft, nxhtml), but there's been no discussion of what *must* be fixed and what new features we are willing to postpone a release for. OTOH, there are many relatively safe features (FFI from SXEmacs, my support for libcurl and neon, Aidan's Common Lisp compatibility improvements) that I don't see much point in freezing out at this point. Bottom line: I don't think anybody, not you, not me, would actually do any work on a feature- frozen branch. As I see it the way to go is to just get the GPLv3 stuff merged as quickly as possible and start talking about what a release would look like immediately. The main obstacle to the GPLv3 merge at this point is that I want to have beta release with a decent release announcement for the work that's been done over the last two years, but that's a major task. I suppose we could live without it (ie, I could just pick a random pre-merge revision that works well for me and call that the beta). But I also want to look at the files that have been updated for GPLv3. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta