Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

[David Engster]

Ted Zlatanov writes:
> - I am not aware of any projects choosing Bazaar for any reason,
>   technical or not, since RMS' decision.

CEDET.

OK, not a great data point, I admit that. :-)

I think bzr is good enough (and much, *much* better than during the time
Emacs switched to it), and I could live with bzr being in maintenance
mode if it was actually rock-solid. However, next to the obvious ELPA
branch bug, it also seems the conflict handling during merges is still
problematic. I hit such a bug, and it would have been a showstopper if
some nice guy from the bzr mailing list hadn't shown me a workaround:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2012q3/075253.html

What also worries me is that our CEDET repository seems to have become
nonconvertible during the merges, and development on the 'Fast Import'
plugin seems to have stalled as well, so I don't think bugs like
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr-fastimport/+bug/1057534 will ever get
fixed. Therefore, I'm not sure we could even switch to git if we wanted
to. It is also very unfortunate that for this reason we cannot provide a
git mirror, which I consider to be important for attracting developers
in the first place.

> - the Gnus project has a person dedicated to Bazaar-Git bidirectional
>   synchronization; it is a very demanding task for the rest of us.

Well, I don't believe that git will make cross-project merges easier, at
least not until someone shows me how (and don't just say "submodules",
please ;-) ).

-David