The other day, I wrote about Bozhidar Batsov’s TL;DR take on the Emacs 27.1 NEWS file. Batsov’s post hit the highlights but if you want to know everything that’s new, you have to go over the NEWS file itself. Happily, Mickey Petersen has provided his traditional exegesis of the NEWS file. The NEWS file is already quite long so with the added commentary, Petersen’s post is even longer but I find it easier to read than the plain NEWS file.
It’s incredible how much the developers put into this release. A lot of it are things that are mostly of interest to developers rather than end users but even for the average emacser there are a lot of improvements. There are, for instance, some changes that provides better control of the startup process.
Petersen does a good job of explaining what the portable dumper is and why it’s necessary. This has been a long-running problem since the glibc maintainers said they didn’t want to support the capability any longer because Emacs was the only software that used it.
There’s much, much more than I’ve mentioned so you really should read it yourself. A nice thing about Petersen’s post is that it explains why some seemingly uninteresting changes are really a bigger deal for the average user than they appear. It’s a long read but worth going over if you’re a serious Emacs user. It’s divided into sections so you can read it piece-by-piece if you like.