Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Rasmus]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gmane.emacs.devel as well.

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     Once Emacs switches to git, I would guess the percentage of people on
>     this list who do not install magit will shrink to a tiny number.
>
> What is magit?

In their own words

    Magit is an interface to the version control system Git,
    implemented as an Emacs extension.

    Unlike Emacs' native Version Control package which strives to
    provide a unified interface to various version control systems,
    Magit only supports Git and can therefore better take advantage of
    its native features.

It has so very nice features but it very git-centric.  For instance in
the diff-view you can stash (precommit) only a subset of changed
lines, effectively splitting your uncommited work into several patches
easily.

> Why is it preferable to using VC?

A while ago VC was not good for git.  I think I remember having issues
with committing several files in one commit and with branches way back
with VC.  There has been some recent patches for VC-git so it's
probably better now.  I haven't tested VC recently (I mostly use the
command line).

Magit has a lot of traction by now.

> And why is it not in Emacs?

The current maintainer is Jonas Bernoulli (Cc) and the original author
is Marius Vollmer.

—Rasmus

-- 
Slowly unravels in a ball of yarn and the devil collects it