From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:50:29 +0900 Message-ID: <87hajr9iqy.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <87ehf1cwc4.fsf@maru.md5i.com> <20130331220136.GA16863@saturn> <20130401070006.1b17508d3c3c69b69ac22bc7@gmail.com> <20130331234002.GC16863@saturn> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1364777446 19715 80.91.229.3 (1 Apr 2013 00:50:46 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2013 00:50:46 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Xue Fuqiao , Michael Welsh Duggan , Leo Liu , emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Giorgos Keramidas Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Apr 01 02:51:12 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1UMSxr-0000dN-T1 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 01 Apr 2013 02:51:12 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:57715 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UMSxT-0007Vn-CW for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:50:47 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([208.118.235.92]:52935) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UMSxL-0007T3-SK for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:50:40 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UMSxK-00086N-PU for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:50:39 -0400 Original-Received: from mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:50026) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UMSxK-00085Z-7q for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:50:38 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1F1D0970865; Mon, 1 Apr 2013 09:50:30 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id D86F81A3D97; Mon, 1 Apr 2013 09:50:29 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: <20130331234002.GC16863@saturn> X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta32) "habanero" b0d40183ac79 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6.x X-Received-From: 130.158.97.224 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:158502 Archived-At: Giorgos Keramidas writes: > Of course. I do not presume to say that Mercurial is going to be around > for more than $FOO, As a program, CVS is still "around" and someone as authoritative (in Emacs) as Stefan has had good words to say for it. :-) Heck, I still use RCS in some contexts. The right question is "how much longer will CVS *the project* be around?" The answer to that is that that project died years ago. git seems to be moving much faster than Mercurial now, although Mercurial development is far from "stopped". Regarding git vs. hg from the viewpoint of Emacs: The senior Python developers are almost all of the school that VC is a necessary nuisance, so they don't display much interest in the VC as long as their workflow continues smoothly. For various reasons, their workflow is much heavier weight than any VC is, so VC features are a small consideration to them. They probably won't change again until that future generation of VCSes has as great advantage over Mercurial as Mercurial (and other DVCSes) had over CVS 5 years ago. (Really good subtree/submodule support, or really good bidirectional merge support would probably do it.) Nor is there a strong grass-roots movement to replace Mercurial, or voices demanding more features in the VCS. I believe that Emacs is different. Although some senior developers (rms, eliz, and Handa-san prominent among them) argued at the time for a very conservative approach, as much like CVS as possible, others have been active in DVCS for a long time (eg, Stefan and Miles have been fiddling with other VCSes since Tom Lord's Arch was a collection of bash scripts), and Eli himself has gone well beyond "minimal" use of bzr. There may be as many people using git to manage their Emacs branches as there are bzr users, and everybody is agreed that the current state of Bazaar is unsatisfactory. To summarize, Emacs developers as a group are pretty sensitive to improvements in the VCS, and therefore it would be "nice" if they could have the leading VCS most of the time. It is my opinion that the architecture of git (including the plethora of plumbing commands that people seem to love to hate) makes it the odds-on favorite for the role of "leading VCS", more than Mercurial. The rapid development of "cloud" implementations of git like GitHub may be a hindrance from Emacs' point of view, though, because they clearly decrease the pressure for improvements in git's CLI. Caveat: rms doesn't consider any of that relevant at this point.