Re: Move to a cadence release model?

[Xue Fuqiao]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 2:20 AM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Richard,

>   > I have been impressed with open source projects that have made the change.
>   > I am now employed at Mathworks which ships mission critical software to
>   > very large enterprise customers on a 6 month cadence.
>
> We don't consider Emacs an "open source" project, but that doesn't
> mean we can't think about this proposal.  However, you haven't said
> what it means.  Can you please spell out in concrete terms what you
> have in mind?

I think what John had in mind was to make Emacs release earlier and more
frequently (i.e., be time-based instead of feature-based), thus creating
a tight feedback loop between developers and users and eliminating the
risk of creating a new release that no one will use.  This means that
users will see smaller changes more frequently.

Some examples of this model are Linux (a new release every few months,
although there is a separate set of "stable" branches), Firefox (a new
release every six weeks), Chromium (roughly the same as Firefox), and
LibreOffice (six monthly releases).