Re: Git mirrors

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:37:42 -0400 Glenn Morris <address@hidden> wrote: 

GM> Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>> I think it would benefit the GNU Emacs project, the Emacs developers and
>> maintainers, and the Emacs community as a whole if there was an official
>> read-only Git mirror of the Emacs repository that was updated with every
>> Bazaar push.

GM> I just want to make the point that since Bazaar is a GNU project, IMO
GM> this would not benefit the GNU project as a whole. (I'm not saying don't
GM> do it, just making a point.)

I have seen many projects (including Emacs) that provide tarballs as a
convenience to users, even though they use something else as their VCS.
So to me, this is just an improved tarball with the commit history.  It
happens to be in the Git format and thus many nice tools can use it and
synchronization is easy.  But it's explicitly no better than a tarball
for the purpose of committing changes back, which is the important
message IMO.  If there was another DVCS format that people want as much
as they have asked for Git, then provide it too.

Many open-source and free projects have Subversion-to-Git and x-to-CVS
bridges with the same idea, to make checkouts easier without endorsing
the delivery mechanism.  I don't think it's disingenuous to do this.

Ted