Re: A release, perhaps?

[Laura Conrad <lconrad@world.std.com>]

>>>>> "David" == David Z Maze <dmaze@mit.edu> writes:

    David> Traffic on gnu.emacs.gnus suggests that, if I upgrade to
    David> the latest CVS version of Gnus, all of my problems (at
    David> least with get-posting-charset) will be solved.  I've
    David> worked on enough projects to distrust this; an arbitrary
    David> snapshot of something out of CVS is as likely to work
    David> properly as to crash Emacs horribly every time I start it
    David> up.

I think it's a little better than that.  I did have a pretty bad
experience once since we've had the CVS, but I reported it promptly,
and the subsequent traffic suggested that if I hadn't, someone else
would have.  I think enough people are getting CVS pretty often and
using it pretty heavily that if you're:

        reading the ding list
        have the last stable version to go back to
        set mail-source-delete-incoming to nil

you should be pretty safe.

I was missing a couple of those points when I hit the bad version.
This is how I know to write the list.  If there are things I did right
without thinking about it that other people have found out about the
hard way, please add them to the list now.

    David> In the good old days of Gnus 5.6, there would be a Gnus
    David> release every week or two.  Not every release worked, but
    David> there was at least a semblance of quality control.  It'd
    David> certainly be nice to be able to periodically pull down a
    David> prerelease version of Gnus that's more reputable.

I agree with all of this, but not enough to volunteer to do the QA.  I
think the days when there were regular releases were also the days
when Lars was working something like full time on gnus.  What we have
in CVS is a lot of people doing small occasional fixes, which isn't
conducive to the kind of work that goes into a release with quality
control.

-- 
Laura (mailto:lconrad@world.std.com , http://www.world.std.com/~lconrad/ )
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