Re: Git mirrors

[Vijay Lakshminarayanan <laksvij@gmail.com>]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Vijay Lakshminarayanan <laksvij@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>>
>>> Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>>>> I just object to the way Óscar (inter alia) is being shouted down.
>>>>
>>>> Óscar is using the past to complain about the present.
>>>
>>> The past is "choosing bzr over other Free alternatives was politicaly
>>> motivated regardless of technical merit; the interests of GNU prevailed,
>>> users were dismissed."
>>
>> I don't get this.  Eli raised the same earlier.  Yes, it was a political
>> decision.  What's wrong with that?
>
> For the nth time: I want to know why such policy is considered good for
> the Free Software cause (being GNU an instrument of such cause), because
> I perceive that such policy creates animosity among the creators of Free
> Software and goes against the principle of merit, which is second after
> Freedom.

I don't believe that git is technically superior to bzr.  So your
"principle of merit" does not hold here.

> Anything else are strawman arguments introduced by others, who are
> reacting on a Paulovian way at the presence of certain keywords :-)
>
> [snip]
>
>> Emacs and several other GNU projects are the /only/ projects I know
>> which officially make their sources available in multiple SCMs.
>
> You don't know the projects that I know, then.

Very likely.  And if said projects do exist out there in the wild,
asking them to support One More SCM will probably get you nowhere.

> To be fair, it is so easy to create and host a git/mercurial/bzr mirror
> of a Subversion/git/mercurial project that there is no need for official
> support. AFAIK, it is not so easy to create and host a git mirror of a
> bzr project, probably because the main hosting sites (github, gitorious,
> etc) does not consider bzr relevant enough to care. And now you will
> ask: "why don't you ask those hosting sites to add bzr support?" and my
> response is: "this subthread is not about that (see above)."

This seems like more reason to support bzr.  As a GNU project, it takes
higher priority than other Free Software projects out there.

And now that I've said the above, your question, quite justifiably is:
(repeated from above)

> For the nth time: I want to know why such policy is considered good for
> the Free Software cause (being GNU an instrument of such cause), 

The reason to support GNU projects over others is that it is the stated
goal of GNU that all distributed software should be Free and copylefted
by law.  To this end, any software project that shares the same goals
will be supported.

Git, Linux etc., fall under the principle of "Open Source" which is a
pragmatic rather than political movement.  This movement states that
software must be Open Sourced because that's the best way to develop
software in general and that free software is of higher (technical)
quality than proprietary software.  It follows from this that if it can
be proven that software is better developed behind closed doors and
released proprietarily said advocates must drop what they're doing and
release their code proprietarily.  (Before you say otherwise, Adobe
Photoshop is /way/ better than GNU Gimp and Microsoft Word is /way/
better than Libre Office.)

The GNU project makes no such claims.  In their words, free software is
its own good.  Just like free speech implies people can freely make
racist statements, free software implies that there can be free software
out there that does bad things.

Please note that these are /my/ opinions and not those of FSF.  I don't
represent the FSF in any capacity.

-- 
Cheers
~vijay

Gnus should be more complicated.