Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Mark H Weaver]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden writes:
>
>> David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> That's not all that much manpower.  If you take a look at the commits in
>>> the master branch that are not merges from the stable branch, I think
>>> that more than 90% are from Andy Wingo.
>>
>> That's an interesting way to pretend that Ludovic and I don't exist, by
>> excluding merges.
>
> Work on the stable branch is supposedly maintenance rather than
> forward-looking development.
>
> It's actually a good sign for a project's stability if more people work
> on maintenance than on new things.  But I was commenting on the amount
> of manpower getting work done on new things.

Plenty of "new things" have been added to the stable-2.0 branch.
Just read the NEWS file for 2.0.

  
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=guile.git;a=blob_plain;f=NEWS;hb=stable-2.0

>> Why should our contributions be excluded just because they start out
>> on the stable-2.0 branch and later flow to master by way of merges?
>
> Would you claim that the stable-2.0 branch is where new developments are
> generally done?  That would seem like a somewhat unusual development
> model.

Yes, it's unusual, but whenever possible we add new modules and other
features to the stable-2.0 branch, so that users of 2.0 will benefit
from them.  The exceptions are:

* Work related to the new compiler/VM, which have changed substantially
  on the master branch.

* Disruptive changes that carry a significant risk of adding new bugs.

* Changes that would break API or ABI compatibility.

     Mark