Re: ognus

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:

> >>>>> "PA" == Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
> 
>  PA> All other CVS based projects I know of either have HEAD as the front
>  PA> of the development branch, or are planning to do so in the future
>  PA> because having HEAD be the stable branch causes too many problems.
> 
> I doubt many of them have absentee maintainers, a lack of management
> and not even the ability to make a release or update a web site.

Nor are they writing newsreaders in Emacs Lisp.  Of course the
management situation needs to be cleared, but that doesn't mean we
have to start making decisions that have proven bad in their projects.

> The fact that this exchange is happening is indicative.  I shouldn't
> be doing the work I am and I certainly shouldn't find things change
> under me like this without warning.  (I'm not a beginner.)

I don't know why you are doing that work.  None of the earlier Emacs
bundles have been trying to track Gnus development, they have just
integrated a specific version.  I don't see the XEmacs people having a
specific Gnus branch either.

>  PA> There are no excuse for picking up software with CVS and
>  PA> expecting stable code.
> 
> So people wouldn't advise users to do that?

People advise others to take illegal drugs and engage in unsafe sex
with strangers.  "People" will always give stupid advice, given how
most cvs based projects works, "users" have no excuse for following
that advice.  CVS access is meant for developers, most of whom are
working on the development branch, not end-users[1].

> How should things be
> stabilized and users provided with useful fixed versions?  (I know
> stabilization prior to Gnus releases isn't traditional.)

Gnus _is_ released, and like all the other released versions I find it
pretty good (and stable).  

>  PA> Aren't all the 5.8.7 point releases stable?
> 
> I don't know what that means.

I meant `5.8.x'.

>  PA> I thought Lars always required assignments for Gnus code.
> 
> You might think or hope that.  You might hope that everybody with CVS
> write access would have an assignment on file and that no-one else
> checked in anything dubious.  If you were Gerd or me, you'd be
> disappointed and waste a lot of time on the issue.

Well, he used to avoid e.g. Kyle Jones code (which is both relevant
and very high quality, but unassigned).

Footnotes: 
[1]  Someone pointed out that using CVS to retrieve a specific tagged
release make sense, also for end-users.