Re: 22.0 Release Status: Important news

mb> XEmacs 21.2 CVS is shippable now, modulo a few little things mb> like NEWS files and other documentation. No, it's not. It will be Feb 1 at the earliest before I will be ready to think about shipping this. I don't really have a good idea what it is I have committed to shipping yet, let alone documents written about it. mb> I suggest you not bother and simply ship what we have on mb> Feb. 1. Now _this_ is a truly crackpot idea! :-) You realize that all open source development will come to a stop, perhaps for years, as the entire community has a collective heart attack when a major app, an Emacs, yet, is released a month ahead of schedule? mb> But Stephen, you're doing most of the work, so you get to call mb> the shots. That is probably what will happen, since Bill Perry is not talking and Ben is projecting delivery much too late. However, I've been believing in magic and miracles since the days of the Mamas and the Papas and Fleetwood Mac; this is not the time to stop. Ben could deliver a miracle. Bill has a working prototype (based on 21.1) and code that builds from 21.2. Just a little magic... I'll keep believing until Feb 1. mb> The worst thing would be for new development to grind to a mb> halt while we wait. As you should know by now, I disagree wholeheartedly. New development can always be restarted if it's stopped artificially (eg, by feature freeze). Except for Mule/NT, all of the projects that might be hard to restart are done, except for testing. Filling buffers is easy. Flushing them without corrupting the contents is the hard part. Vin evidently agrees with me: vin> Yes, next week is too soon. Everyone should be focused on vin> the current version, not the _next_ version. The XEmacs vin> project is now in a period of stability, and contributors vin> should focus on supporting the release effort. Unfortunately: vin> Opening a development branch will distract the contributors vin> when we should all be aiming towards the fast-approaching vin> release. Realistically, they're already distracted. The only sensible thing to do is damage control. My feeling is open the new devel branch now, so there's a place I can arbitrarily divert patches to without getting lynched. SJT> Do we know how to move the head of trunk to that branch? SJT> When should we do that? martin> I suggest we cut the branch for 21.4 on Feb. 1. March 1. That's the scheduled date, and I see no reason to advance it. I would like to have a testing period with widgets and pdump in, even if we decide to default them off. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."