Re: Using Git to manage your Emacs changes

[Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org>]

"Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> writes:

>    >     Then what is necessary to do to make Git a GNU package?
>    >
>    > Agreeing to follow our practices on a lot of issues.  It is most
>    > unlikely that Torvalds would agree.
>
>    Does it really matter that much?  I am certain that their are other
>    parts of the GNU system (like, perhaps, TeX), where the hackers in
>    question don't follow GNU policies.  In fact, Bazaar doesn't
>    completely follow GNU policies (no texinfo documentation, and no
>    real plans to generate it either).
>
> While TeX is part of the GNU system, it is not part of the GNU
> project.  I hope that bazaar will adpot texinfo manuals soon, I think
> someone was working on that.

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.

On the bright side, if someone could modify Sphinx to generate texinfo
then I would get my Python documentation back in texinfo format as well.

Besides, that would only solve the documentation part of the problem.
texinfo documentation is not likely to make the existing Emacs (or GNU)
developers like Bazaar.  Nor is it likely to make Savannah support
Bazaar at least as well as it supports git.  The documentation problem
is actually relatively minor, and it is a problem shared by both bzr and
git.

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.

I love Emacs, and I have come to really like Bazaar, but I can not help
but feel that by helping the Emacs development team move to Bazaar I
have actually done both of these communities a disservice.  Bazaar has
received nothing but bad publicity from the switch, and the Emacs
development group appears to have been hampered more than
helped--despite the fact that Emacs was switching from crufty CVS.
Moving from CVS should have been a no-brainer, and yet that has not been
the case.  In my defense I assumed that Savannah would be using a smart
bzr server, which really would help a great deal.

Jason