Re: Git mirrors

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 06:31, Stephen J. Turnbull
<address@hidden> wrote:

> The politically committed did use it. Many others refused.

Many others did use it, even though they were not "politically
committed". I switched to using it, and politics wasn't involved. I
just wanted to hack Emacs. Apparently, for some people distaste of the
tool, or the politics, was stronger than the desire to continue
helping develop Emacs.

> For quite
> some time, despite the existence of the GNU Savannah, the repo of
> choice was hosted at Launchpad.

Yes, there were some rough times at first, and the official repo took
a time to be set up in the best possible way. And even so, using it
was perfectly viable and not half as bad as some wanted to believe.

>  > well... which competition?
>
> Excuse me?  The obvious competition: Subversion, git, Mercurial.

I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean that there were no technical
alternatives. What I meant is why suppose that selecting the tool was
a competition? It wasn't. There's no written law that says that
switching tools *has* to be a competition. The Emacs project has a
political dimension that GNU Pascal has not, for example.

> git was and is a much better choice for fostering the "share
> my Emacs hacks" ethos that has always been a part of this community,
> but would have required substantial effort on the part of the more
> conservative members of the community.

Sorry, but git is not so evidently superior than disliking it is being
conservative. Suggesting so borders on ad hominem.

> Richard made the decision.  I don't see Richard making any
> contributions to Bazaar at all.  I see Eli and Stefan reporting bugs,
> which is indeed a contribution, but hardly *making* it better.  Emacs
> is always waiting on Bazaar, waiting on Savannah, waiting, waiting,
> waiting.

Please. "Making it better" does not mean hacking Bazaar yourself. The
simple fact that such an important project as Emacs switched to bazaar
certainly did pressure the Bazaar developers to make a lot of
improvements (helped, no doubt, by Eli's many bug reports ;-)

As for waiting, waiting, waiting... The truth is that we waited much
more for the Savannah people to act that for the Bazaar crowd to fix
bugs.

> The decision was made, and as I replied to Ted Z, this is
> GNU policy.  However, I don't see a lot of follow-through in the
> direction you indicate.  Am I missing something?

If you mean that Bazaar is not a lot better now that two or three
years ago, I don't know what to say.

> Once again, the existence of groff doesn't stop GNU from using TeX.
> The existence of bash, gawk, and GNU sed doesn't stop GNU from using
> perl.  And so on.

And Savannah offers git access, etc. It's not like git is forbidden in
GNU projects.

> I just object to the way Óscar (inter alia) is being shouted down.

Óscar is using the past to complain about the present. And he's
refusing to use Bazaar. His prerogative, but is not unlike complaining
why Emacs is written in C and not C++. That's just not the tool that
Emacs use. Please, do adapt.

    Juanma