Re: Do pretests reach end users? (was: When will emacs 27.1 be officially released?)

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

May I chime in?

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> it takes a long time for Emacs problems to be discovered and reported.  A new 
> Emacs release can take years to reach end users.  We are routinely receiving 
> bug reports about changes made two or more releases ago.  If you are looking 
> for a single most important reason why it takes so long to put out another 
> pretest, it is this one: experience shows that it takes weeks if not months 
> for enough people to try a pretest and report the problems they see.

Emacs pretest release?  Is that a thing for systems other than Microsoft 
Windows and Guix?

— Unstable Debian comes with Emacs 26, Ubuntu gets Emacs from Debian.
— Arch comes with version 26, AURʼs ‘emacs27’ is 27.0.60 — an outdated February 
snapshot [1].
— Unstable Nix, again, contain 26th Emacs.
— Fedora provides only stable version of Emacs.
— Homebrew — guess what?

And even pretest releases for Windows do not seem to be mentioned in any way on 
<https://gnu.org/s/emacs>.  How users are supposed to get them?

In other words, I am not much surprised of the lack of early bugreports.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/emacs27-git/

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