From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: source repository Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2007 18:13:02 +0900 Message-ID: <87ir90y1k1.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <200707031442.28402.pogonyshev@gmx.net> <468A3997.2040500@f2s.com> <200707031514.17225.pogonyshev@gmx.net> <87tzskyeuf.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <18059.11141.84106.905999@kahikatea.snap.net.nz> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1183539718 25898 80.91.229.12 (4 Jul 2007 09:01:58 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 09:01:58 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Eli Zaretskii , emacs-devel@gnu.org, Paul Pogonyshev To: Nick Roberts Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Jul 04 11:01:56 2007 connect(): Connection refused Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1I60kF-000456-TC for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:01:56 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1I60kF-0005xt-2l for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 05:01:55 -0400 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1I60k8-0005rH-K5 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 05:01:48 -0400 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1I60k6-0005nN-Fz for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 05:01:47 -0400 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1I60k6-0005n1-6H for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 05:01:46 -0400 Original-Received: from mtps01.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.223]) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1I60k4-0003l0-Hp; Wed, 04 Jul 2007 05:01:45 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mtps01.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id C35551535AF; Wed, 4 Jul 2007 18:01:42 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 7CE1C1A2968; Wed, 4 Jul 2007 18:13:03 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: <18059.11141.84106.905999@kahikatea.snap.net.nz> X-Mailer: VM 7.17 under 21.5 (beta28) "fuki" (+CVS-20070621) XEmacs Lucid X-detected-kernel: Linux 2.6, seldom 2.4 (older, 4) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:74287 Archived-At: Nick Roberts writes: > It will be a waste if the chosen system becomes unsupported. Both git and Mercurial are quite mature, and eminently maintainable in the very unlikely chance that either becomes unsupported. > some will sink into oblivion. While CVS has undoubtedly presented > problems, they are small compared to more practical ones such as > finding people with the right skills who are willing to work unpaid > on Emacs. Pay is not why I don't work on Emacs (much, directly). Although unwillingness to wrestle CVS is not the main reason, I would be *far* more likely to work on Emacs directly more often if the personal cost of keeping a repo up-to-date were negligible, and the cost of communicating a working version of Emacs containing my contributions to others were small. How many developers are in this boat, I don't know. Can Emacs afford to ignore even one? > Personally, I would like to see us change to a distributed system > but would prefer to wait until there is one clear candidate. I > guess I could stand one change, but two would be too many. There will not be one clear candidate for many years, if ever, but there will nonetheless be no reason to change again project-wide for quite a while. As David Kastrup has pointed out, the "d" stands for "distributed", and therefore there must be a well-defined protocol for communicating full metadata among repositories. Neither subversion nor CVS has that, really, but all of the dSCMs do, and they agree to a remarkable extent on what the needed metadata is. This is not just theory; there are already many conversion tools available, and dSCM being what it is and free software developers being what they are, the (small) burden of converting to Yet Another SCM can be amortized over the group of enthusiasts for that SCM. The project just continues with whatever it had been using for archival and distribution purposes. My personal recommendation at the present time for projects is Mercurial, because portability issues can be delegated to Guido van Rossum and the rest of the very capable Python crew. git is obviously going to work better on Linux than anywhere else for a while, and it's not obvious that darcs is going to work well anywhere at the moment. Footnotes: [1] Of course this would require some work by FSF legal, but I see no reason why it would be impossible to write an appropriate assignment instrument, and enforce it with appropriate commit hooks.