Re: Basic Bazaar guide for Emacs hackers.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 >  . The page is biased towards contributors who don't have write access
 >    to the Emacs repository.  Notably, it gives almost all examples
 >    using the HTPP URL, not the SFTP one.

That's right, but the reason I left it that way was not "committers"
vs. "others".  It's "URLs we are almost sure will work" vs. "URLS we
hope will be replaced by much better schemes".  If at all possible, we
want the SFTP URL to be replaced by bzr+ssh, but that does not work at
all right now.  My logic is that as it stands, the reader who doesn't
remember the committer URL must go back to the beginning, where she
will see the warning about possibly changing URLs.

@RMS: Is there no chance that you will intervene and ask the Savannah
admins to increase the priority of bzr+ssh?  This is extremely
important to the uptake of Bazaar on Savannah.  With dumb transports
like HTTP and SFTP, frequently network transfers of 25MB have been
observed in the process of committing a tiny (~10 lines) patch,
because a whole pack (essentially, a zip file full of diffs
representing revisions) gets transferred from the local system to the
upstream master.  With a bzr server, only the diff need be sent, and
the pack is rewritten on the upstream master's host.  This affects all
committer workflows, and IIRC locks the repository so that other
committers cannot write (AFAIK it's still readable, but of course
readers will get stale data).

But the concerns of the Savannah hackers are valid.  Although
discussion on address@hidden indicates that their security
analysis is incorrect, they must convince themselves that is true, and
that is not costless.  Only you have the stature to increase the
priority of that work.

 >  . A Unix-like system is assumed without any notice to that effect.
 >    Some commands will not work on Windows without subtle changes.  For
 >    example,
 > 
 >     echo "public_branch = http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/trunk"; >> 
 > .bzr/branch/branch.conf

In this particular case AFAIK you don't need the quotes on Unix either.

 >  . "Other Resources" should be at the beginning.  Someone who looks
 >    for a CVS-like way of doing things should not be required to read
 >    through such a long document to find the alternatives near the end.

You are welcome to edit it that way if you want.  I believe you would
certainly have RMS's support in doing that.  I'm not going to play
"last patch wins" if you do, and I don't think Karl will either.