Re: New sync'd branch

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On Aug 28, 2009, at 5:04 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>>> Not good at all.  I don't want to waste my scarce time to learn Git,
>>> in addition to Bzr.

I found the learning part (bzr and git) to be good fun since the basic  
concepts are quite easy.  The great time-wasting happened when I tried  
to actually do stuff with bzr and the Emacs repository, because  
everything took ages with bzr (even after their optimizations) and,  
more often than not, I got incomprehensible error messages from deep  
down in the Python code (how is that for good UI?).   Changes to the  
repo format were plenty, and usually the formats were incompatible or  
had to be converted on-the-fly, making things even slower.

Developers on the bzr mailing list were very friendly and responsive,  
but that doesn't help when basic quality assurance doesn't work and  
when the basic design is prone to useless error messages and slow  
operation that doesn't scale well with project size (commit numbers).

I don't contribute enough to Emacs proper for my opinion to be heard  
here, which is why I've quietly switched my own branch to Git, despite  
the pain I'm anticipating when the git mirror will be recreated.  It's  
well worth it.

(By the way, I use git with git-new-workdir from contrib/ in order to  
keep multiple branches in parallel without wasting disk space.  That's  
the bzr model of a local shared repo, as far as I understand it.)

> First, you are probably working on GNU/Linux most of the time.  By
> contrast, most of my Emacs development is on MS-Windows, where
> installing git is an adventure at best.  Last time I looked (I'd love
> to learn things changed since then), most of git were Unixy shell
> scripts, which means I will need to install Cygwin or MSYS.

It seems like there's a complete point-and-click installer with msys.   
Looks very Windowslike to me.  Mostly up to date (July 09) and  
comfortable.

http://nathanj.github.com/gitguide/tour.html