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Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

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Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#51

Post by davexunit »

bachback wrote: post #28

wow. please, please, you Emacs/LISP gurus out there: make a working modern package manager and integrate the browser like lighttable does. and perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch so that the source code makes sense in today's world not in 1980's world. unfortunately lighttable is staying closed for much too long, but something like it is desperately needed.

>make a working modern package manager

package.el works great.

>integrate the browser

That may actually be possible in the future, see http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsXWidgets

>perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch

That is just silly. The current Elisp interpreter might be replaced with an Elisp implementation on top of the Guile VM. That would be quite the big upgrade, technically speaking.

>unfortunately lighttable is staying closed for much too long

I agree, I don't have much faith in the "it will be free eventually, just trust us" development model. If the project really wanted to be community friendly then the source code would have been free from the beginning.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#52

Post by thrillgore »

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 used Mercurial with a hg-git plugin back in the day as we were a Mac-only shop and I was the only schlub with a Windows machine (I was in charge of fixing IE issues). Mercurial was very good back then, when Git performance was subpar on Windows.

Git on Windows is now blazing fast enough that msysgit will get you by. I still favor the Git workflow even when I am using other SCMs (like right now, where we have a Subversion dependency)

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#53

Post by mjs »

sigzero wrote: post #44
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

If Tcl Core wanted to move to git, Fossil exports repos to that format. So they really lost nothing. They have a small team of commiters as well so Fossil works just fine for them.

Well, there's also the "social and signaling effects" of using something that's non-git, that Eric S. Raymond articulates well: "we cannot afford to make or adhere to choices that further cast the project as crusty, insular, and backward-looking."

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#54

Post by noinsight »

EnderMB wrote: post #46
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've noticed this, oddly, while my workplace is transitioning to git from Mercurial. A lot of developers using .NET tend to go for Mercurial because a while back it felt a lot nicer to use on Windows. It's why I always preferred using Mercurial. A few .NET shops that use TFP/VSO are moving towards Git for the Visual Studio support, but I've noticed a few Python and PHP developers making the switch to Mercurial. To be…

> A lot of developers using .NET tend to go for Mercurial because a while back it felt a lot nicer to use on Windows.

In my opinion it is more elegant. Git only works because it installs hacked up Linux utilities on Windows. In practice it might not matter but I feel dirty when I'm using "inelegant" solutions.

I guess it's a matter of taste or opinion but Mercurial is easier to use too. Though if you're just working on something solo the SCM doesn't really matter at all, you just commit and commit (and I mainly work solo).

Personally I also write mostly in Python so I'm naturally drawn to Mercurial.

Then again I've also been looking at and using Fossil for my projects because it's a single binary with no installer which makes it pretty cool in my opinion. It too works well and it's used as SQLite's SCM so I'm confident it won't screw up my projects. The other nice thing (although I haven't used them extensively) is that Fossil also includes an embedded web server that has a wiki and ticketing system so everything's integrated.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#55

Post by bachback »

ElliotH wrote: post #50
bachback wrote: post #28

wow. please, please, you Emacs/LISP gurus out there: make a working modern package manager and integrate the browser like lighttable does. and perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch so that the source code makes sense in today's world not in 1980's world. unfortunately lighttable is staying closed for much too long, but something like it is desperately needed.

Emacs has a package manager, it works fine. I particularly like that I can script it to install my packages on first run.

works fine = work fine for me after I have spend x hours looking around the net, writing elisp myself. that's the whole problem with lisp. it is not communal, because it does not enforce standards.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#56

Post by saalweachter »

swah wrote: post #37
bachback wrote: post #28

wow. please, please, you Emacs/LISP gurus out there: make a working modern package manager and integrate the browser like lighttable does. and perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch so that the source code makes sense in today's world not in 1980's world. unfortunately lighttable is staying closed for much too long, but something like it is desperately needed.

I agree - Emacs has to be rewritten on top of a modern rendering engine!

They did. It is called 'Eclipse'.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#58

Post by levosmetalo »

officemonkey wrote: post #13
crncosta wrote: post #7

"git won the mindshare war" Sad, but true...

They had two things going for it: * Linus was using it for the kernel, so it became mature slightly faster (because it had more people's attention.) * Github happened at the same time Sourceforge stopped being cool (this is the same time that Digg and Reddit started beating Slashdot.)

Github became popular because people wanted free Git hosting, not the other way around. Most other Github features just get in the way.

Also, instant branching are really convenient feature. I remember the time when I was using Darcs that I got lost pretty quickly with 10 copies in 10 directories.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#59

Post by falcolas »

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?

As an avid git user, I believe that git's victory against current tools does nothing to stop someone from creating a better DVCS in the future. They'll just have to identify why git won and address those points, if they want to dethrone git.

Re: Bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move

#60

Post by agumonkey »

filipncs wrote: post #40
bachback wrote: post #28

wow. please, please, you Emacs/LISP gurus out there: make a working modern package manager and integrate the browser like lighttable does. and perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch so that the source code makes sense in today's world not in 1980's world. unfortunately lighttable is staying closed for much too long, but something like it is desperately needed.

Rumor has it that LightTable will be open sourced very soon, but I doubt it will ever take the place of Emacs.

I doubt it will too, but I hope it gets a nice "marketshare" so people try to experiment and find new ideas. Emacs will probably benefit a lot from cross-pollinisation too (it excels at absorbing new ideas).
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