Re: VC mode and git

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:

 >   >   In Richard's case, he
 >   > testifies to weeks between pulls.
 > 
 > That is the way I need to do it.  There is nothing wrong with this,

You protest too much.  Nobody said that there was anything wrong with
your timing of pulls.  I'm sure most of us have projects where we
often pull only with intervals of weeks or months.  The question is
how to deal with that.

 > and our previous version control systems supported it with no
 > trouble.

Of course, git does too!  What git doesn't do is support your CVS/bzr
workflow without changes.  git itself will resist incorporating the
changes you want, I'm pretty sure.  ESR has resisted the changes you
suggest to vc.el.

The easy road for you and Alan is to learn a git-adapted workflow, or
perhaps adopt the hook that Stefan advocates[1].  (Really, it is
easier.)  If you two had spent as much effort learning git as you have
on what has basically been a flamewar, you'd be have a reasonably
problem-free (VCS) workflow already, without changing your programming
workflows.  IMHO YMMV, but actually implementing the changes will be a
lot of work, and integration to the upstream projects will be an
uphill battle.

And that's why I think that what "everybody does" is relevant.  You
ask "why doesn't git (or vc.el) support the same workflow as CVS?"
The answer is quite complicated, actually, but from your point of view
can be proxied by "the maintainers don't want to".  Since you are
apparently a small minority and clearly "refusenik" in nature, the
maintainers are hardly motivated to make efforts on your behalf.

I believe it unlikely that there's little chance that vc.el will
address your needs directly (and zero that git will).  Your protests
that there must be lots of developers like you is empirically
unsupported (doesn't mean it's not true, just that your introspective
evidence isn't a head count), and to some extent the maintainers
believe supporting a CVS-style workflow is counterproductive.

Specifically, there *is* a lot of evidence that people who have tried
git-adapted workflows quickly learn to like them (even if they never
learn to really like git!)  I often get replies like "this is cool/
surprisingly effective, too bad it's not default/requires specifying
an option/isn't more discoverable" when I help people tweak their
workflows.  I'm sure the maintainers get the same response only more
so.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Apologies to the person who actually proposed it, I forget who
you were.