Re: BZR and the bootstrap

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:20:57 +0200
> 
> > I think just turning off VC-facility while building is good.
> > Are there any merit in having it while building?
> 
> I don't think VC brings any benefits while building Emacs, indeed.

Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of turning it off in some
circumstances.  From the moment we made VC an inherent part of
visiting files, it should do that always, because this is now a
routine part of file ops.  If we disable it in some situations, a Lisp
programmer will be unable to tell when VC is available and when not
without consulting the code or the docs, because no one will remember
all these conditions a year from now.

> OTOH, if it needs to be turned off in this case, maybe it needs to be
> turned off in other cases.  IOW, I'd rather try and make sure VC "never"
> needs to be turned off, or only in cases where the user really has an
> odd config that justifies such a measure.

Right.

> E.g. we could change VC so it figures out which backend is in use
> (etc...) more lazily.

I think the problem here is with running "bzr status".  But we could
be smarter about doing that in a lightweight checkout.