Re: [Fwd: [arch-users] Re: Gud lord!]

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

Robert Anderson <rwa@alumni.princeton.edu> writes:

> They are defined by regexps.  I don't think regexps can reasonably be
> considered "murky."

  Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use
  regular expressions."  Now they have two problems.
                                         - Jamie Zawinski[1]

> I don't see how you can say that it is not stable.  The core of the
> system has been stable for a long time.  I don't see how performance
> improvements can be considered "instability."  

Any changes the system go through will have to be tracked by someone.
If the existing CVS crew were to admin arch as well, they'd be even
more overworked.  Otherwise, Emacs developers would have to learn
everything about arch, at the cost of doing Emacs development.  (And
it would be nice to get a release out sometime.)  This change will
also impact all of the Emacs developers, taking time away from any of
their development.

Any time the software needs to get upgraded, or file formats get
changed, or the user-defined naming conventions turn out to be
ill-advised and need to be changed, productivity on all levels will
be hurt.

> The only thing that needs to be worked out about those other things
> is users' understanding of them.

Sure... and that takes time and effort that could be spent stabilizing
Emacs so that a release with new features can get out.

And since arch is immature, it means that all the best practices have
yet to be figured out.  Why force that on Emacs developers?  Let
other people figure out things so that Emacs can tread in their
footsteps and not waste too much time to the transition.

No matter how mature arch is, or how well-documented the transition
steps may be (like importing the multiple active branches currently
under development in a sane way) it would still take work and cause a
bunch of disruption.  And for the ability to rename files[2] it's
certainly not worth it.  For the rest of the features, it may be
worth it... or maybe svn would be better[3], or maybe something
else.  But that decision can wait.

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=33F0C496.370D7C45%40netscape.com

[2]  Yes, that's where you brought this up.

[3]  which _does_ offer a CVS->SVN conversion tool....

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - I am the rocks.
Looking for a developer in St. Louis? http://web.springies.com/~ats/
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