Re: 21.4 vs CVS HEAD of a month ago.

[David Kastrup]

Peter Seibel <peter@javamonkey.com> writes:

> I've been running a version of Emacs I built from CVS HEAD back on
> January 18th. I saw the Februrary 8th announcement of 21.4 and grabbed
> and built it a few days later. However it seems to still be lacking
> certain features, such as SMTP authentication, that are present in my
> CVS version. Also the version of Gnus is older in 21.4 than my CVS
> Emacs. Have I screwed up something in my installation or is 21.4 still
> lagging CVS HEAD of January 18th?

21.4 is 21.3 with a single security related bugfix outside of the
Emacs binary itself.

What people have been talking about as the coming 21.4 for so long is
now the coming 22.1.  The circumstances of the bug disclosure did not
allow for a discussion of the release process among a larger circle of
developers in advance (the respective mailing lists are publicly
available and archived) and was done by very few people.  A more wider
discussion might have led to the version number becoming something
like 21.3a instead.

However, given that the current development version is really a
completely different beast than the 21.1-21.2-21.3-21.4 chain would
suggest, this future version change might more properly reflect what
people might be expecting from such a number change.

And even if there are any surprise releases in between without
significant progress, one will be able to identify them by still being
21.something.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum