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

[Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org>]

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>Many people contribute to several projects and have to balance their
>time between them, and if contributing to one project is unpleasant for
>some reason, they may dedicate less of their time to it.

This isn't personal, but I generally find such complaints about vcs
unpleasantness as a barrier to contribution to be a red herring.  It's a fact
of life in today's FLOSS world that we have a universe of vcses (distributed
or otherwise) to contend with: git, hg, bzr, svn, cvs are all out there
holding the source code for projects I care about.  Add to that, the equally
wide variety of code hosting services and workflows those projects have
adopted.

If I have a nasty itch to scratch, I have to just suck it up and learn the
basics of all that in order to provide a patch or branch that is valuable
enough to upstream that they'll spend their very limited resources shepherding
my patch to successful landing.  Frankly, it's not all that hard to learn (or
re-learn each time ;) the basics of any of the vcses, and it's usually just a
very small part of the investment to contribute to a project.

I'm *much* more concerned about the workflow, efficiency, and comfort of the
project leaders, the people who are doing the bulk of the development work,
reviewing and accepting branches and patches, making releases, etc.  If
choosing CVS and Bugzilla makes their lives easier, go for it!  I can adapt.
And I should adapt because the work they put in far outweighs the work I put
in on the project.

In some ways, it's like the choice of programming language.  Okay, I don't
love Perl or C++ but if that's the project's choice, and I want to contribute
in ways big or small, I learn enough to do so.  But it seems unfair for me to
say "if you just ported everything to Python, I'd be much more willing to
contribute".  I have to ask myself, is that really true?

OTOH, the sentiments above do count, in the sense that as a contributor, you
are volunteering your time too.  Maybe you choose to only contribute to
projects that use Ruby on Mercurial and only run on Debian ARM devices.
As a volunteer, that's your prerogative.

-Barry

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