RE: Pretest

[Drew Adams]

> Unless something comes up, I would like to make the first pretest this
> Sunday, the 25th.  Please plan your commits accordingly; thanks.

Are you kidding?  Or did you perhaps mean Sunday, Nov 25, 2012 (that sounds more
like it)?

After Martin relentlessly and carefully worked out the bugs from his humongous,
many-faceted, and detailed buffer-display changes, you suddenly changed it all
again (recently).  And during a feature freeze, no less.  Even Martin (our
resident window/buffer-display expert) has admitted that he does not yet
understand the new code.

Does that count as "something coming up"?

How much design, development, and testing time did you put into the new design,
compared to the hundreds of hours (perhaps 100s of days?) that Martin spent on
his approach?  I'm not defending or attacking either design (I was OK with the
Emacs 18-23 one).  I'm just asking about the relative effort and care expressed,
as one possible measure of how fully baked this might be.

There has hardly been time to collect reports of the fallout, let alone attempt
to repair the damage from this change.  I've had the experience of only one
Windows build with the new approach, and there have been code changes since that
build.  I immediately filed one bug - but got no reply to it of any substance
(http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=9532#11).  Think, for contrast,
how long you let people digest the lex-bind changes...

And AFAICT there is still no user-understandable doc explaining simply and
clearly how to use the new system and how to map pre-Emacs-24 behavior and
preferences to it.  Not to mention a clear presentation of the changes in NEWS.
(Is there even an UNclear one?  All I see is "FIXME: buffer-display-alist
changes").

I thought the decision about this (user-unrequested) feature was that we were
going to _take the time to get it right_.  Two nano-seconds after a sudden
design change you want to start pretest?  Bad.