Re: Using Git to manage your Emacs changes

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org,  jwiegley@gmail.com,  tzz@lifelogs.com,  lennart.borgman@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,  juri@jurta.org,  schwab@linux-m68k.org,  david.reitter@gmail.com,  eliz@gnu.org,  miles@gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:33:49 -0600
> 
> Bazaar has this marked as a bug (wishlist), but they are essentially
> waiting for someone to come up with a way to make texinfo documentation
> from their existing rst documentation.  In fact, it could easily be
> argued that they are moving farther away from texinfo as they have moved
> from simply requiring docutils to requiring the more complicated sphinx
> documentation build system.

If Bazaar developers want help in automatic conversion of their docs
system to Texinfo, they should talk to Texinfo maintainers.  With the
upcoming switch from makeinfo written in C to texi2html written in
Perl, it may be easier to add additional translators; at least that
was the theory and the justification for the switch.

> My question, and I ask this as a person whose one small contribution to
> GNU is that I helped (a bit) with the conversion of the Emacs repo from
> CVS to bzr, is why pretend that Bazaar is part of the GNU project when
> the GNU developers (and systems administrators) seem to overwhelmingly
> prefer git?  Worse, they are actively trying to undermine Bazaar,
> including long discussions on how to circumvent Bazaar on this very
> list.
> 
> Dump bzr and make git part of the GNU "system," if that is what it
> takes, but do not pretend that Bazaar is part of the GNU project when
> clearly it is not.

Please do not exaggerate, and please do not generalize too much from
what you've heard here.  There are definitely several people who were
discussing git, but I would not recommend concluding that they
represent the ``overwhelming'' part of Emacs developers.  They
certainly do not represent me.  I'm using Bazaar, and I do not intend
to switch to git any time soon.

> Bazaar has received nothing but bad publicity from the switch, and
> the Emacs development group appears to have been hampered more than
> helped

I think both of these assertions are false.  I definitely feel that
Bazaar helps me more than CVS did.  I do hope that Savannah will
switch to the smart server some time this century, and I definitely
would love to see Bazaar need less bandwidth than it asks for now.
Then the quality of my life as an Emacs developer will be better yet.
But it has definitely improved already, since we switched.  So I would
like to thank you and others who've helped make that happen.