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Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

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Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#81

Post by lmm »

xradionut wrote: post #42
mikro2nd wrote: post #41

>git won the mindshare war. I regret this - I would have preferred Mercurial, but it too is not looking real healthy these days I confess that my perception of Mercurial is the diametric opposite of the author's. Recently I believe I have seen a modest resurgence of interest in Hg and increased uptake. Am I just seeing this through some peculiar VCS-warped glasses? I believe that much of the popularity of git stems f…

I hate when people say "git won the war", it sounds like an excuse to close minds and stop progress. What if "Microsoft won the war"? Or vim? Or IBM? Or Java? Or Taco Bell?

Microsoft did win the war; very little progress has been made by its competitors from the time; what's had success has been new OSes - OSX, iOS and Android (which while built of GNU/Linux pieces, is radically different from traditional GNU/Linux - enough to qualify as a different OS IMO, since the API is different).

Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better.

IBM did win the war, and then shot themselves in the foot with pricing on their new generation (which generation was a pretty radical shift). There's not much chance of git doing that.

Java did win the war; its competitors from the time are largely dying (Objective-C has had a kind of zombie revival due to iOS, but I don't expect it to last). You could argue that Ruby has overtaken it, but again the changes over the last ten years of ruby - and the influence of rails - have been enormous.

I don't think we should stop trying to make a better VCS. But I do think we should accept that Git has won against bzr and hg in their current form; neither of those will displace git without radical changes that they are probably unsuited to make. Most likely the successor to git will be a new program entirely.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#82

Post by davidw »

rbanffy wrote: post #67
mickeyp wrote: post #24

The important take-away here isn't the relative merits of each DVCS, but that bzr is not used by anybody any more, and it is impeding the uptake of new contributors to Emacs.

Compared to the decision (and ability) to contribute to Emacs, the choice of DVCS seems to be rather unimportant.

For core work, it's probably not that important. For trivial patches, it's probably kind of a pain in the neck. But a lot of people start with a small patch, so it's best to encourage them by making it easy.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#83

Post by hyperpape »

I went back and looked at the older discussion, and it doesn't paint Stallman very well as the head of a project. He pins the question of whether to keep using bzr not on whether it is good or whether the Emacs developers want it, but on whether it's being "maintained".

But then he seems to define maintenance as having fixed a specific bug that's been around for over a year, blocking a point release.

He admits that he can't follow the developers list to see if they're genuinely doing active maintenance (reasonable enough: he has a lot on his plate), but also won't accept the testimony of Emacs developers that the mailing list is dead and there's no evidence of real maintenance.

When questioned, he says that there's too much at stake to abandon bzr if it can be avoided at all. But the proposed replacement is GPL software. This is just madness.

Refs: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg009....

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg008...

(and surrounding posts).

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#84

Post by thearn4 »

pcx wrote: post #19

Here is a previous discussion on emacs-devel from Mar'13 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/thread... Stallman's opinion on this subject - http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg009... TLDR Stallman doesn't want Emacs to give up on bzr (also a GNU project) yet. This opinion might change now though.

Just read the link to Stallman's opinion - side question: he signs his name with a Dr. prefix. But did he finish graduate school at MIT?

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#85

Post by wirrbel »

rbanffy wrote: post #67
mickeyp wrote: post #24

The important take-away here isn't the relative merits of each DVCS, but that bzr is not used by anybody any more, and it is impeding the uptake of new contributors to Emacs.

Compared to the decision (and ability) to contribute to Emacs, the choice of DVCS seems to be rather unimportant.

For me, I know to use subversion and git to a degree that I am really comfortable with (from the two I stronly prefer git). Another VCS means that I have to take a few leaps, new commands, subtle to extreme differences in workflow as well as different names for the same things. So a VCS that is well-known by people will (on average) make contributing more convenient to the average potential contributor.

After diving into Emacs' codebase, changing or tweaking a few things that bug me, there are a few walls to climb when actually contributing those changes. I.e. cleaning up the code, creating a patch/pull request, outlining changes and intentions, etc. An unfamiliar VCS adds another burden to the contributor. Remember that we are not talking about people who are paid for diving into their employer's VCS but about people who primarily work on other projects.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#86

Post by lmm »

DigitalJack wrote: post #68
zobzu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git is used by a bigger project (the kernel), that's mainly why. they're all ok, otherwise, even with their technical differences. github also contributed to amplify the adoption as its makes it really easy to use (even thus people generally use git in a non-distributed way with github) (i do prefer git in usage, tho, but thats subjective i suppose)

for me it's the easy branching and rebasing that make git the winner. That's in spite of the inconsistent cli. If Hg were as good at branching and rebasing, I'd reconsider it. btw, anyone know of a python command line client for git? I just keep finding stuff for programmatically using git and that's not what I want.

What do you mean, a python command line client? If you're using it from the command line and not programmatically, why does it matter what language it's written in?

(gitless may possibly be what you want)

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#87

Post by blumentopf »

hyperpape wrote: post #83

I went back and looked at the older discussion, and it doesn't paint Stallman very well as the head of a project. He pins the question of whether to keep using bzr not on whether it is good or whether the Emacs developers want it, but on whether it's being "maintained". But then he seems to define maintenance as having fixed a specific bug that's been around for over a year, blocking a point release. He admits that h…

> it doesn't paint Stallman very well as the head of a project

Is this news to you?

Cf. e.g. http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#88

Post by davidw »

noinsight wrote: post #57
davidw wrote: post #36

The Tcl guys are in a similar situation - they use Fossil. Which by all accounts looks pretty cool, but at this point it's "not git". http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki

Fossil is also used for SQLite's SCM.

Yes, they're written by the same super bright and productive guy.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#89

Post by rlpb »

tenfingers wrote: post #38

I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. That being said, Bzr is slow, it was always slow from day 1 -- and slowness is part of the UI experience.

Popularity means developers, which means bugfixes and more features in the future which projects may want to use. Switching DVCS has a cost to a project. Thus software popularity is important.

This may be unfortunate, but this is how it is. DVCSs are by no means complete today, and cross-pollination of features continues. An unpopular project that has fewer developers working on it will fall behind. A project that doesn't want to keep switching DVCS has a reasonable interest in the DVCS project's future, since future features will come "for free".

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#90

Post by Someone »

thearn4 wrote: post #84
pcx wrote: post #19

Here is a previous discussion on emacs-devel from Mar'13 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/thread... Stallman's opinion on this subject - http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg009... TLDR Stallman doesn't want Emacs to give up on bzr (also a GNU project) yet. This opinion might change now though.

Just read the link to Stallman's opinion - side question: he signs his name with a Dr. prefix. But did he finish graduate school at MIT?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman, he has 14 honorary doctorates and professorships.
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