Re: [CEDET-devel] Switching CEDET from CVS to a Distributed VCS.

[Lennart Borgman]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 5:23 AM, David Reitter<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Jun 24, 2009, at 6:45 PM, Lennart Borgman wrote:
>
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> I think I have said it before, but I believe it is worth saying again:
>> Emacs repository will be moved from CVS to Bazaar. And since CEDET is
>> going to be included in Emacs you will most likely be using Bazaar
>> after that.
>>
>> Alex, as I said before I do not know much at all about version control
>> system. However even from my limited understanding of this I still
>> can't find room for arguments for using something else than Bazaar for
>> CEDET. Will not using something else than Bazaar put an extra burdon
>> on Eric? And I guess that is what we all want to avoid ... ;-)
>
> If it helps others over at Cedet:
>
> I evaluated Bazaar over the course of 6 months for Aquamacs (which
> incorporates the full Emacs repository).  Using Bazaar with this repository
> (and coming up with a workable conversion of Aquamacs and Emacs CVSes) was
> endless pain, frustration and bug reporting (starting with cryptic error
> messages from the bowels of Bzr).
>
> Bzr is well-meant and its UI is well-designed, but it lacks the efficiency
> and reliability to manage a repository with >100k revisions.   It lacks a
> quality assurance process (with its monthly release cycle that's difficult)
> and reliable error signaling / integrity checking (its ever-changing
> repository formats are not seamless at all w.r.t. transitions).  It is
> dog-slow with a large repository, even with the latest changes to "bzr log".



Thanks David, hope you do not mind I am sending this along to Emacs Devel.

Are these problems still there? In that case they might be very
important for the time scale when switching Emacs to using Bazaar.



> Git has been painless and elegant.   Nothing gets in your way.
>
> All that said, I tried very hard to make Bzr work for us and spent a lot of
> time dealing with bugs, precisely for the reasons that Lennart stated.
>
> For a smaller repository, Bzr may well work, especially if you don't import
> a "messed up" CVS repo with many branches.
>
> (Otherwise, it seems that a lot of Emacs dev's use Git to manage their work
> privately before transferring their changes into the Emacs repository.)