Re: Git mirrors

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:12:17 +0200
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
> 
> The decision on Bzr was political, not technical

Yes, it was.  So was the decision to develop GNU Emacs, GCC, and the
whole GNU Project.  And your point is?

> and now objections are made to adding support for other Free tools
> as a service to those contributors that consider them more
> convenient.

No, there are no objections to that.  You (or anyone else) are free to
set out to make that happen, whether on Savannah or elsewhere.

Objections _are_ made to force the Emacs project to do this work for
you, when in fact the Emacs project already provides a reasonable
solution for distributed development and contribution to the project.

Let me turn the table and ask you: are you aware of any significant
number of projects that use git and provide a bzr gateway for those
who want that?  I have yet to see such a project.  And I fully
understand the maintainers of those projects: they have selected a
tool which is a reasonably good one, so people who want to contribute
should use it, or find their own ways of coping.  I do the latter (in
Gawk and in GDB): I use the bzr-git plugin, although it sometimes
makes bzr much slower.  But that's _my_ pain, so _I_ take the
responsibility for applying any painkillers I need.

Why should you expect the Emacs project to behave differently from any
other Free Software project?  If someone have an itch to scratch, that
someone gets to fix it -- unless she succeeds to convince the head
maintainers that the itch is serious enough to be scratched by the
project.  It should be quite clear now, both from what some of the
maintainers wrote and from the silence of others, that this thread
failed to convince them, as did in fact past threads of the same
nature.  So that leaves people who cannot live without git with the
obvious choice -- make it happen, or stop complaining once every few
months.

> What I'm saying is that that does not send a friendly signal to
> other Free Software projects and representing GNU as an unfriendly
> competitor of other Free tools harms the cause of Free Software.

I fail to see how this interpretation can be gleaned from what's been
said here.  Projects that use git as their VCS are not being accused
of being "unfriendly competitors" to the GNU Project, and I, for one,
don't think they are.  So what you say is simply unfair.  I hope
fairness is still a virtue around here.