Re: Periodical releases

[chad]

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.

*Chad