Re: Git mirrors

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 > > Because most of the projects in the class you have mentioned produce
 > > free *software*, but their political principles are those of the open
 > > source movement.  Emacs is different because it *is* a Free Software
 > > project.
 > 
 > I specifically mentioned Gawk and GDB, which are GNU projects as much
 > as Emacs.

And therefore should follow the same GNU policies as does Emacs.  No?
So those aren't relevant examples, as the question is "why is the GNU
policy what it is?"

 > Choosing tools solely on technical capability isn't the policy, true.
 > But that's not really the point, because I was talking about the
 > behavior _after_ a decision has been made, not about the decision
 > itself.  IOW, about "now", and not about "then".

That's cheating, of course.  Óscar was talking about both, and
specifically asked why such a policy exists in the first place.  If
you're going to ignore his point, you can't complain that I ignore
yours.

I think he deserves an answer.  It's up to the Emacs leadership whether
that answer is "off-topic" on-list and more responsive off-list, or if
it's worth giving a recap for the several members of the community who
clearly don't understand it on-list.

If you really want these discussions to go away, I think the best
approach is to explain the policy, justify it, put it in the FAQ, and
then shut off future discussion with "off-topic" and a pointer to the
FAQ and an appropriate venue for policy discussion such as
gnu.misc.discuss.

 > > Promoting an unusable tool merely because it had the GNU label is most
 > > definitely unfriendly competition.
 > 
 > Bzr is not unusable, so this argument is simply false.

Eli, if you want to make absolutist arguments like that, start writing
in the propositional calculus.  If you want to continue in English,
then don't be silly.  We all know that your English is good enough
that you can recognize an exaggeration with much truth in it when you
see one.

With regard to the question of "in this case, how much truth is 'much
truth'?", see my response to Juanma.