Re: Gud lord!

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 05:28:04PM -0700, Robert Anderson wrote:
> I'd venture that a lot of such discussion as seen on various well-known
> discussion sites has often bordered on the inane, mostly from hastily
> drawn conclusions about a poorly understood system which does take some
> time to understand and appreciate

You're entitled to your opinion of course, but I've seen enough, from people
that I trust, to feel cautious.

Emacs is a fairly mature system, and has muddled along reasonably well with
CVS's brain-damage, so there's little need to make any quick decisions.  I
think that at some point there'll be an obvious movement by a lot of projects
to adopt either subversion or arch (and I guess there are actually a few more
possible contenders).  I'd guess that Emacs will probably switch too at some
point, and probably won't be the last -- but I don't think it should be among
the first.

Please don't take my comments to mean that I dislike arch -- I don't, from
what little I know about it, it seems like a very interesting and cool system.

In fact, I _like_ the idea of switching to something new and cool because I'm
as annoyed by CVS's bogosities as much as anyone (maybe more than most
people -- as I use a slow modem link, and I understand that arch handles
incremental updates much more efficiently than CVS [sending diffs both ways]),
but again, I think this is a place where some conservatism is warranted.

[Anyway, RMS is the maintainer, and I suspect he may be even more
conservative than me with regard to this issue.]

> > (1) the somewhat murky rules/conventions for designating source-controlled
> > files,
> 
> They are defined by regexps.  I don't think regexps can reasonably be
> considered "murky."

I think the issue was that this decision was based on names at all.  I seem
to recall that there was a way to `register' files as well, but that there
were issues with that as well.

BTW, thank you for posting this, because at the least, it's some impetus to
look more closely at the current state of things.

-Miles
-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Ghandi