Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

[Wojciech Meyer <wojciech.meyer@gmail.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Daniel Colascione writes:
>
>  > As I see it, the only other viable candidate is Mercurial, which,
>  > while being high-quality, actively-developed free software, lacks
>  > the user base of git.  If Mercurial and git are equivalent of
>  > technical and ethical grounds,
>
> Evidently, they're not.  Technically, people care about UI, and many
> people hate git's.  Ethically, git uses copyleft but most of its
> developers are pretty clearly firmly in the open source camp (vs. free
> software), and some of its most popular associated tools (GitHub) use
> non-free code without apology (although it seems that a lot of people
> associated with Linux kernel development don't exactly appreciate the
> attitude of GitHub in many respects).
>
> You may not believe either of those outweigh the economic advantages
> of git, but you should acknowledge those differences of opinion as
> objective facts.

In general, the popularity of tools in my opinion is one of the key
factors how much momentum the project will gain. There are of course
other ways of gaining that momentum, and they usually require a bit less
of consideration and work. Looking at improvements to the documentation
or wiki pages, it might be the right solution for the projects that
can't easily switch to some other technology like Emacs, where it's just
does not look feasible. It takes a bit of time, and people understanding
and willing to do this. Emacs has a great wiki, and possibly the same
could be done for the developers. Surely people tried to document bzr on
Emacswiki but maybe documenting the internals would be good. On other
hand Emacs itself does have certain other threshold to get the
contributions working, it's a primary GNU project (which personally for
me was the showstopping problem, and I didn't realise at time it will
take that much time to get my papers done in my company, and eventually
I didn't contribute, and still don't know why) and it has certain degree
of tooling and knowledge required.

So, I think contributing to Emacs is what many people dreamed about, but
there shouldn't be any unneeded barriers for that. (I don't even count
FSF paper work, because I believe it's extremely important to get it
done for the sake of being fair with the ideology). I think some
people are convinced enough to even use Bzr to get the pleasure of
contributing to project like Emacs. :-)

Cheers,
--
Wojciech
http://danmey.org