Re: Apologia for bzr

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Using Git won't magically give us any new blood.  But using Bzr is
> a hindrance.  A few years ago, users seemed happy to use Hg for one
> project, Git for another, DaRCS for yet a third, etc....
>
> Nowadays most users complain when they have to learn another tool.

Nowadays most users complain when they have to learn.

Nowadays most users complain.

But that's, again, a side consideration.

I am currently involved with LilyPond, a music typesetter and working as
a fulltime programmer on it.  So I am doing plenty of additions.

Like one sees with many significant contributors and/or project leaders,
I spend so much working _on_ LilyPond that I have factually ceased
working _with_ LilyPond.  So quite a few significant usability
improvements happen when I

a) on a rare occasion actually have to transcribe some music piece and
get appalled at how weird something is
b) try explaining on a mailing list how to do some programming or
transcribing task with LilyPond and get appalled at how weird something
is.
c) try writing documentation for some problem and get appalled at how
weird...

You get the point.  Often the weirdness is decades old and people just
got used to it.

Now in this discussion here, for better or worse, there is the somewhat
handwavingly made contention "everybody uses Git nowadays".  Now if
Emacs is supposed to be useful to people, that means it should support
Git well.

If we stipulate that the main task several powerful Emacs contributors
are using Emacs for is, well, working on Emacs, then their focus to get
weird things or things not matching the tool well under control will be
on the version control system they are using in connection with working
on Emacs.

So if we don't have a particular axe to grind for a particular version
control system, it makes sense moving Emacs to what is used most often,
just so that the friction between Emacs' and PVCS' keybindings,
commands, documentation, workflow, concepts will be most obvious when
working with the most prevalent version control system.

When Eli says "working with Git under Windows is a pain", then it may be
nice to have as the ultimate goal the addition "unless you are working
with it from within Emacs".

Emacs is really great for working on Texinfo, Lisp, and C files.  And
part of the reason it has strong points there is that these are the
languages involved with working on Emacs itself.

-- 
David Kastrup