Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

["John Wiegley" <johnw@newartisans.com>]

>>>>> Michael Welsh Duggan <mwd@md5i.com> writes:

> I see these Git versus Bazaar arguments pop up every now and then on this
> forum.  I must admit my experience with Git has been better than that with
> Bazaar, but I have to ask, why isn't Mercurial being considered?  From a
> license perspective, Mercurial is GPLv2+, while Git is GPLv2.  I found
> Mercurial's command-line UI much easier to learn and understand than Git,
> and I believe the two are fairly comparable in power.

I love to debate technical merits as much as the next guy, but that really
wasn't the motive for my opening post.  What we have to consider are issues
affecting Emacs development as a whole -- not how well structured one DVCS'
DAG is over another, or whether one license is stronger than another.

Here is a brief list of things I believe we want in a VCS for Emacs:

 - A stable VCS, with an active community, where bugs get fixed in a timely
   fashion.

 - Something fast, efficient, and with good performance "over the wire".

 - A system people stand more chance of already knowing, so there is little
   inertia to prevent them from becoming active Emacs contributors.

   There are some of us (present company included) who use Bazaar for nothing
   else outside of Emacs, but who do use Git on a daily basis for many other
   projects.  It would be nice, at least from a personal standpoint, if I
   could leverage that experience.

 - As much of a consistent ecosystem among various areas of Emacs development
   as possible.

 - A system with a good integration story in Emacs itself (magit!), since this
   is the environment many of us will be working in.

 - A system with lots and lots of external resources we can point people to,
   with an active and helpful community, so that we ourselves are never bogged
   down answering question about said system.

I think Git presents us with a pretty good answer to each of these points, in
terms of Emacs development.  Bazaar has an answer to some of them as well, but
I think no other system is as resoundingly in our favor as Git on almost every
point.

John