Re: Git mirrors

[Vijay Lakshminarayanan]

Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:

> Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
>>> I just object to the way Óscar (inter alia) is being shouted down.
>>
>> Óscar is using the past to complain about the present.
>
> The past is "choosing bzr over other Free alternatives was politicaly
> motivated regardless of technical merit; the interests of GNU prevailed,
> users were dismissed."

I don't get this.  Eli raised the same earlier.  Yes, it was a political
decision.  What's wrong with that?

> The present is "providing a convenient git mirror is considered not good
> for GNU; once again, GNU is considered more important than users."

Once again, I don't understand.  There's a git mirror.  It isn't perfect
but they're working on it.

> I always thought that Free Software is about the user, always the
> user. But once you begin privileging some packages simply because they
> abide to GNU, and viewing others as "not beneficial" because they don't,
> irrespectively of its merit, then GNU starts looking as a menacing
> entity, something dangerous that pretends to roll over your beloved
> creations just because that's good for GNU's self-interest.

Some projects are "not beneficial".  The FSF and GNU Project have stated
goals and aims.  They are political in nature.  When this is the case,
the metrics used to measure merits of one project over another are
different.  It appears to me that you're entirely stuck upon so-called
technical merits (git awesome; bzr sucks) which is an entirely different
debate.

>> 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.
>
> It is the other way around: the infrastructure must adapt to the needs
> of users, whenever there are enough technical and human resources. If
> some Emacs hackers feel more at home with
> git/mercurial/whatever-other-Free-tool, why not simply provide it? How
> could that be "not good" for GNU, the spearhead of Free Software? The
> "do adapt" means, exactly, "down your throat!". There is no need for
> that, other than political reasons. Those are damaging the user and
> sending an unfriendly message to other Free projects.

Emacs and several other GNU projects are the /only/ projects I know
which officially make their sources available in multiple SCMs.  You
could go complain to the developers of, say, OpenJDK or FireFox and
insist that they provide their sources in git/bzr.  I doubt it'll go
anywhere.  Why you expect differently here is again beyond me.

-- 
Cheers
~vijay

Gnus should be more complicated.