Re: PROPOSAL: Move to git, now that bzr is no longer a req.

[Bozhidar Batsov]

On 2 January 2014 19:56, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2014 12:28:04 -0500
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>
> Cc: Karl Fogel <address@hidden>, address@hidden

>
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:
> > I love bzr and hate git.  I hope Emacs will not switch from bzr in my
> > lifetime, not to git anyway.
>
> I can understand hating git; the UI is pretty nasty, and there is at least
> a colorable argument that containerlessness is a bug.  I use git in spite
> of its defects, not because I don't know they're there.

I use git, too.  That's why I hate it, not because I've read about it
in some blog.

> I don't understand loving bzr; my experiences with it have been unpleasant.
> I would be interested to hear your apologia for it.

I don't know where to begin.  In a nutshell, it is simple to use, yet
powerful enough to give me several important workflows, and an easy
way to fix any mistakes I happen to make (although lately there are
almost none).  It works on Unix and on Windows alike, and does both
seamlessly.  

Try running bzr with Python 3 for instance... Probably this is never going to happen. I took quite some time for 

bzr to become compatible with Python 2.7. Git works pretty well on Windows these days, but admitted this was not the situation

few years ago. 

 

The UI is orders of magnitude simpler and easier to grasp
that that of git.  

Is this so? Many things in bzr seem like black magic to me. Such assertions are extremely subjective, of course.

 

The documentation, while it can use some serious
improvement, is nevertheless orders of magnitude more clear than git's
man pages, which seem to have been written by some math professor who
can produce rigorous formal papers, but doesn't have the slightest
idea how to write useful and efficient user documentation.

I think the git man pages are pretty decent and the online docs are superb. 

 

And of course, everything is similar but subtly different from bzr, to
the point that I need to consult my notes on every step, for fear of
making a mistake.  The switch from CVS to bzr was very simple by
comparison, even though the d in dVCS did require some mind shift.

I have the same problem using bzr - as everything is different from git in subtle and not

so subtle ways.

 

> Mind you, I think opposing git adoption is like trying to stop the tide
> from coming in, at this point (and have my own mixed feelings about that).

You probably don't know me well enough, if you are surprised by my
trying to stop the tide.

bzr has some pretty serious weaknesses - its conflict resolution mechanism is terrible for instance.

On the Emacs side of things - git users can benefit from the power of magit and with bzr we have only vc-dir to work with. 

I think this is a tide not worth fighting. I had some problems years ago migrating from SVN (and the associated mindset) to

git, but once I grokked git I've never looked back.