Re: GNU Emacs is on Bazaar now.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Karl Fogel writes:
 > Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
 > >In my reading of some of the stuff in this thread, the annoyances were
 > >known, but solutions for them were not revealed on purpose, to avoid
 > >some potential confusion.  Apologies if I misunderstood.
 > 
 > I think you did misunderstand.
 > 
 > AFAIK, no one has withheld solutions to avoid confusing people.

I agree with that.  I have opposed putting those (proposed and
*untested*) solutions into the document I have helped write to avoid
confusing *me*!

I think there's another point of misunderstanding here as well.  The
centralized features of bzr are designed to support a *project-wide*
centralized workflow (eg, with mandatory reviews and full testing of
*all* patches before pushing to the public mainline), *not* to help
people used to a CVS-imposed centralized workflow integrate gracefully
into a basically decentralized workflow.  I don't think anybody here
has experience with these halfway, make-it-easy-for-the-busy-developer
workflows.  Anyway, I don't, and so I cannot recommend them, and will
distance myself from any document that does.

Nor is the workflow Óscar describes as simple as it seems.  First, it
can't be used with vc yet because he implicitly assumes a commit-all-
related-changes-at-once workflow.  AFAIK at this point means using the
command line, not vc (compare to the workflow Handa-san described of
just C-x v v C-x b ... until all files are done).[1]

Second, he says he doesn't recommend it for larger changes; instead,
the feature branch workflow is what he recommends.  So Handa-san is
going to have to learn a workflow at least as complex as the one in
BzrForEmacsDevs in the fairly near future anyway (at least I hope he's
going to keep contributing major improvements to Mule at the current
pace!)

Finally, Karl says he's a little upset about these criticisms.  I'll
go beyond that.  Remember that Bazaar was chosen for purely political
reasons.  "We have no extremely experienced bzr users who can help
others" was *not* a consideration.  "The Bazaar docs are not much help
for Emacs devs" was *not* a consideration.  These things have come
back and caused y'all some inconvenebit you on the assince?  Don't blame me.


Footnotes: 
[1]  I know that multi-file features for vc are in progress, but it
won't be as easy as "C-x v v C-x b ... until done", and the UI is
likely to be more or less clumsy and unstable for several months at
least.