Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

[Giorgos Keramidas <gkeramidas@gmail.com>]

On 2013-04-01 07:00, Xue Fuqiao <xfq.free@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Apr 2013 00:01:37 +0200
> Giorgos Keramidas <gkeramidas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > The longevity of the project is very important. git being used for the
> > > kernel guarantees its healthy growth for decades to come by then a
> > > native version system will be built in emacs.
> > > Let's not muddy the water with another tool that is seemingly
> > > adequate.  BZR was seemingly adequate and was regarded could do the
> > > job well. Now years later we are back to square one.
> > > I wish we could move directly to a tool that can serve us for a long
> > > time and have it stayed out of the way of hacking on emacs.
>
> > Mercurial is used for Python itself (and quite a few other large
> > projects), so its longevity is not really a very difficult question.
> > It will be here for at least as long as Python, which Bazaar also uses.
>
> But Bazaar is used for Ubuntu[1], GNU Emacs[2], CEDET[3], GNU Mailman[4],
> Drizzle[5], Inkscape[6], Bugzilla[7], VM[8] and many other projects.
>
> Footnotes:
> [1] https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu
> [2] http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs
> [3] http://cedet.bzr.sourceforge.net/bzr/cedet/code/trunk/changes
> [4] https://code.launchpad.net/mailman
> [5] https://code.launchpad.net/drizzle
> [6] https://code.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev
> [7] http://bzr.mozilla.org/bugzilla/
> [8] https://code.launchpad.net/vm

Of course.  I do not presume to say that Mercurial is going to be around
for more than $FOO, and I didn't post an exhaustive list of projects
using it.  The full list is always available online[1], and it includes
work like Dovecot, the Go and Python programming languages, the whole
Illumos project (previously OpenSolaris), the Linux HA (high
availability project), Mozilla, nginx and many others.

The real argument I was trying to make is 'the fact that project X uses
bzr/hg/git today doesn't really constitute a very strong argument for
the longevity of said VCS'.  Projects can and do sometimes change their
VCS, so saying that 'Ubuntu uses bzr so it's safer than X' is a stretch.

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ProjectsUsingMercurial