Preparing 21.4-1

[Rob Browning]

J=E9r=F4me Marant <jerome.marant@free.fr> writes:

> I hope you're still subscribed to this list :-)

I am.

> I think we can find a consensus about handling autofiles. If you
> agree that we can restrict this to manual updates, I'll be OK
> for such a solution. I don't have any ideological thought on
> this.

> I hope you're not fed up with our recent discussion :-P

Nope.  I realize the autofiles.diff handling is one of the "trickier"
bits in the emacs package, so it's worth discussing.  It's a messy
problem in the first place because the use of dpatch and the use of
the autotools means that you may have some patches which affect the
content of another in somewhat unpredictable ways.

> Also, it would be nice to apply this AMD64 patch (which requires
> changes to configure.in).

Which one?

> I have small fixes around, and I'll try to see if I can backport
> perl-mode from the CVS trunk, which would fix many bug.

Hmm.  How big a change is that likely to be?  If it's likely to change
the public interface of perl-mode (var names, functions, etc.), then
I'd be hesitant.  It would probably be better to backport individual
fixes if possible, or just mark those bugs as fixed-upstream.
Although I'd love to just fix things in 21.4, I think it's also
important for people to be able to depend on the fact that a given
version of emacs behaves a certain way.

For example, I wouldn't be comfortable backporting the current gnus
into emacs21.  IMO that should be handled via an add-on package you
have to intentionally install.

Of course it's a very fuzzy line -- *anything* you fix might be a bug
someone was expecting (and accomodating) in a given version of emacs.
i.e.

  (if (equal? (emacs-version) "21.4)
    ... do something that depends on bug/feature in 21.4...)

So it'll always be a judgement call, and in any cases where we're
really not sure, I'd consult emacs-devel to see what they'd prefer.

--=20
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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