On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 7:38 PM, Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> wrote:
What does "to be tested" mean here? Does it mean that the feature was
not thoroughly tested by the developer yet?
I use the dev builds of emacs as my daily driver. I keep the emacs-25 and master builds ready at all times. For now, I am using emacs-25 as my daily driver, mainly to test it thoroughly before its public release. But if some bug creeps in that thwarts my day-job work, then I can report that and switch to using the master branch build till the bug gets fixed (this is just an example, I haven't needed to do that yet).
I am able to use the emacs-25/master builds as my daily driver because the developers are doing a great job of verifying their contributions, and also because of the feedback for new additions received on this list. But it is possible that some new addition breaks some arcane inbuilt/external package I/someone else might be using. It's for that purpose that the more people use the dev builds as their DD, the better.
Now if there were a separate branch for each new feature, it would cause the following problems:
- Necessity to keep builds ready for different features to try in addition to the master/emacs-<VER> branch
- If I stay on a feature branch for too long, I will miss out the fixes, etc on the master branch. To prevent that, I might need to manually merge that feature in the master branch locally and then build (that's probably what Rasmus referred too).
- This results in frequent need to juggle between the feature branch builds, master build and local merged build.
Or is "testing" on the sense
of "let's see if the feature is interesting enough for definitive
inclusion into Emacs but now it is all over the place and removing it
would be a lot of work so it is here to stay"?
Testing of a feature for its definitive inclusion can still be done on the master branch (like we did for the multiple dir-locals.el feature). As more people would be testing the same master branch build (instead of people being split between master branch and XYZ feature branch), we would get a better collection of opinions and feedback about that feature.
I am not a software developer. So these viewpoints should be taken as from someone who simply likes to build and try out the latest emacs builds :)