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Re: html-mode demanding <html> a bit too tight

From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: html-mode demanding <html> a bit too tight
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:08:26 +0300 
> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 08:22:58 +0200
> Cc: Glenn Morris <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> You may be basking in the illusion that this increases the quality of
> the released Emacs.  I severely doubt that.

Actually, I'm positive that the quality of Emacs codebase has not
improved, on the average, for quite some time.  We are in a limit
cycle, whereby changes are committed that could wait until after the
release, those changes cause breakage, the breakage is fixed, then
another unnecessary change is made, and so on.  And the quality
respectively oscillates up and down, with no visible trend.

The only way to ensure that the pretest steadily improves the quality
is to consistently enforce more and more stringent rules as to what
changes can go in, until eventually the only allowed changes are
trivial doc fixes and simple rewording in the manuals--and then stick
to this stringent policy for a couple of last pretests.

By contrast, it seems that what we do is waiting for a long enough
period without bug reports as some kind of signal that ``there are no
more serious bugs''.  This is of course false, since a period of
silence can (and usually will) be caused by something utterly
unrelated, such as a public holiday or college vacation.  Such
decision policy simply means that we will release at some random point
in time, and the quality of the released Emacs will be similarly
random.  (Yes, this is a straw man, but if someone can provide any
other reasonable rationale for the current decision policy, please be
my guest.)
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