Re: No calc in pretest?

[Jon Cast]

Stefan Monnier <monnier+gnu/address@hidden> wrote:

> > I don't have any strong feelings, but IMHO changing the major
> > version number after only 3 releases is generally undesirable.

> I don't see any good reason why this should be so.

I don't see any good reason why it shouldn't be so, and I don't see
any bad reason either.  Even if you don't think tradition, conformance
to the cultural expectations of Free Software users, etc. are good
reasons, you have to admit they're bad reasons :)

> > So far, the major version changed when some significant new
> > feature was added:

> >    v19 - support for X
> >    v20 - m17n
> >    v21 - new display engine

> What about between v17 and v18 ?

I don't think either of those existed.

> What about between v3 and v4 ?

I know those didn't exist.

> What is the relevance of all of it anyway.

Version number carry information for users, even more than for the
system (although the presence of bug fix releases does change that
slightly.  Users aren't expecting bug fix releases, so they aren't
expecting that change, though.)  How users will read version numbers
is very important to how they should be set up, just like how users
will read documentation is very important to how it should be set up.

> It's merely psychological and not even very strongly felt by anyone
> anyway.

I feel it very strongly.

> To me (and many other people I know), the differences between v19
> and v21 are not that significant since I don't use anything else
> than latin-1 and my bufffers are 99.9% filled with the same
> misc-fixed-semicondensed.  The jump from 19.28 to 19.29 was more
> significant to me in some regards.

Are you arguing we don't have a fixed frame of reference to judge
``major'' from?  I think we do (or should): what is a significant step
toward the goals of the Emacs maintainer?  Those steps merit major
version number bumps.  Others don't.

> > If we follow this, v22 should be the Unicode-based Emacs, not some
> > intermediate release.

> Again, I don't see any reason why this should be so.  If it's more
> convenient to name the current trunk 22.0, then I think it should be
> done.

I don't think we have /any/ gain in convenience labeling the current
trunk 22.0 over 21.4.  And users expect major releases to be, well,
major.  What reason does Emacs have to dis-regard that?

>       Stefan

Jon Cast