Release plans

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Michael Sperber writes:

 > I'd then suggest moving towards a model more in line what many other
 > projects have concluded is a good strategy for producing releases:
 > 
 > - branch off a "stable" branch (leaving a "development branch" and the
 >   "stabe branch"
 > - set a release *date*
 > - fix bugs in the stable branch, merge them over to the development
 >   branch
 > - at that date, branch off the release branch, do n days of release
 >   engineering
 > - release

I'm sorry, Mike, but the mere word "release" does not excite me.
"Producing releases" really sounds like pointless work to me.

I agree, we should get to work and produce some software and release
it.  And some sort of cyclical process with regular releases is good
discipline for getting certain aspects of the software finished, even
polished.  I'm not opposed to the one you describe.  But to me
"producing releases" is not a goal in itself.  The goal is delivering
software to users.  To get excited about a release, and the work
entailed, I'm going to need to be excited about the software and what
it will do for the kind of user who doesn't build XEmacs from a
Mercurial repo.

I'm not excited about delivering XEmacs 21.5 to non-developer users.
Generating the excitement is what the lists are for.