Re: Periodical releases

[Carsten Mattner]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:54 PM, chad <address@hidden> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, the primary motivator for more frequent releases
> of emacs itself is `so emacs doesn't drift so far from its sub-parts', like
> as Gnus, Org, CEDET, CC-mode (in the past), etc.  This is a laudable
> goal, but emacs doesn't seem to currently have the developer cycles
> necessary to handle this - releases are frequently held up by documentation
> changes and reviews even now, with the infrequent releases we have.
>
> Hopefully, the included package system can cover this gap, once it's fully 
> spread
> through the userbase; users will be able to easily opt-in to newer Gnus 
> releases
> (for example) via elpa(s)/packages.  If we get this working reliably, we 
> could even
> remove some packages from the emacs core, in favor of more frequent
> package-based releases.  While this model might have once seemed burdensome
> to users, several years of such systems (for example, in web browser extension
> updates) will have already trained them to deal with such things before emacs
> starts doing something similar.
>
> That's my hope, anyway.

I fully support removing non-essential modes from emacs, now that
packaging is supported officially in a consistent way.