Re: Manual policy (Re: Emacs-devel Digest, Vol 44, Issue 65)

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@ieee.org>]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:44:19 -0400, Eric S Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> said: 

> From: Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
>> Subject: Re: Policy issue in the VC manual -- recommending CVS?!?
>> To: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Message-ID: <470D40AA.6020400@gnu.org> Content-Type: text/plain;
>> charset=ISO-8859-1
>> 
>> Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>> > Recommending GNU arch is dubious considering Arch's
>> > poorly-maintained and poorly-documented state.  If I'm not
>> > mistaken, Arch has been effectively moribund since about 2003.
>> >   
>> 
>> I think you're mistaken. Savannah lists the last release as July last
>> year.

> So it's only been over a year since the last point release.  I'm not
> hugely reassured.

        I can assure you that the tool is functional, and is in
 production use in a number of projects. 

>> > Recommending CVS is well beyond dubious into outright ridiculous.
>> 
>> Like it or not, CVS is stable, and widely used. Its "problems" are
>> widely exaggerated by adherents to the latest wave of version control
>> religions.

> Er.  I've been using VCSes since the days when SCCS was the only one
> in existence.  The fact that I still cheerfully use RCS, the second
> one ever built, makes me pretty bulletproof against charges of
> version-control faddism.  But file-oriented VCSes just plain suck for
> distributed projects, and there's no way to make them not suck.

>> > No recommendations at all would be better than these.  Who decides
>> > what the manual recommends?  If it's "the last person to care", I'm
>> > going to nuke these in a nanosecond.
>> Arch is part of GNU

> Please tell me you're not implying that we should recommend an
> inferior GPLed tool over a superior one just because the inferior is
> distributed from an FSF server.  That would be taking political
> jaundice to an absurd extreme.

        I think you first have to make your case that arch is
 inferior. It does not change a whole lot, but what we have works just
 fine.  Over the last year I have twice evaluate bzr and git, and found
 that they do not support the feature set of arch that I have come to
 rely upon -- so in my view, at least, bzr and git are the inferior
 products. YMMV.

        manoj
-- 
God isn't dead, he just couldn't find a parking place.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
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