Re: Starting pretest

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     Quite a few are more like "misfeature fixes": they improve Emacs
>     in case that indeed there _is_ a useful fix.  But on some of
>     those, the jury more or less is out, and the attempts to improve
>     things don't lead to a satisfactory situation before several
>     iterations.
>
> Which of the things that have been in FOR-RELEASE since Sep 1 do you
> think fit that description?

Well, I don't have an actual clue about when these problems started
appearing.  And there has been "fixing" going on for a _lot_ that is
not in FOR-RELEASE.

>From the list in FOR-RELEASE, I'd guess the following:

    * WINDOWS SUPPORT BUGS.
    These don't need to be fixed to start pretest, but we call the
    attention of Windows users to fixing them.

    ** address@hidden 09 Aug 2006: ispell.el problem on Cygwin.
      (Did we decide that is unreproducible?)

Bug, not misfeature, but likely old?

    ** address@hidden Sep 20 says make-frame ignores left
       and top.

Same here.

    * BUGS

    ** address@hidden: smtpmail.el bug involving base64 encoding.

Bug, likely old.

    ** C-p works properly with fields within the line, but C-n does not.
    (address@hidden, Sep 24.)

    ** Should end-of-line get stuck at end of a field?

Both of those are either old misfeatures, or introduced by turning one
old misfeature into a new one.

    ** Text copied between font-lock buffers doesn't refontify
    because of properties that are preserved.  May be fixed now?

Likely old.

    ** address@hidden, Sep 21: An iso-8859-6 cannot be saved

No idea.

    ** XIM hotkey doesn't work in Emacs.

Likely old.  People that work on those things would have more of a
clue whether these are regressions or rather something that was broken
before already.

And the field movement stuff _clearly_ was of the sort which is not
helping towards a pretest, since a behavior that was seemingly not
satisfactory has been replaced by other behaviors which are seemingly
not satisfactory, and it takes time for the complaints to register.
It was a change of overall strategy, and we don't want those right
now.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum