Re: support for bzr shelve/unshelve in vc-dir

[Martin Pool <mbp@sourcefrog.net>]

On Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:52:04 -0500, Glenn Morris wrote:

> Óscar Fuentes wrote:
> 
>> Contributing to Bazaar is difficult, they know it, and the developers
>> are trying to alleviate the process. But in the end, Bazaar is a
>> Canonical product and its development is guided by Canonical's business
>> strategy.

It's guided by Canonical, since they fund a lot of development, but also 
by the patches and proposals that people put up, including non-Canonical 
people and employees in their personal or discretionary time.  Other GNU 
projects have been like this.  

We had got into a pattern of being two conservative and we are indeed 
trying to make it easier.  If you think it's too tough to get a patch in, 
please tell me or tell Karl.
 
> It's also a GNU project. People ought to be able to feel confident about
> contributing to GNU projects. But when I had a quick look at the
> conditions for becoming one:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html
> 
> I couldn't immediately see anything that would alleviate your worries.
> But, I'm not sure exactly what your worries are.

> While reading the conditions on that page, a first glance at the bzr
> 2.0.2 source shows: it is distributed under GPLv2+ rather than v3+,
> http://www.gnu.org/software/bzr does not exist, it does not have texinfo
> documentation, 

We talked about texinfo documentation at the time of accession to GNU.  I 
understand the value in having every GNU program consistent but texinfo 
is not very technically easy given our platform and the technical 
environment of 2009, and in my opinion not a good use of time.  However, 
if someone has an idea by which we can for example produce texinfo as an 
output, we will look at it.

We also don't use automake because it is not a good match for Python, and 
we don't use GUILE.  The document mixes technical recommendations with 
more long-term issues.

> it contains numerous references to the "Linux" operating
> system, 

Apparently Richard will be in touch about this.

> and there doesn't seem to be any reference in the --version
> output or man-page to it being a GNU project.

There are references in the documentation and on the web site, but 
possibly not enough.  I thought I had fixed --version already, but it 
will be fixed now.

These are just bugs.  Reports or patches are always welcome.

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