[Orgmode] Re: Org-mode development (was: Vacation, and 5.04)

[Christian Egli]

Carsten Dominik <dominik <at> science.uva.nl> writes:

> I'd like to make some comments about the development model or Org-mode
> and put it up here for discussion.
> 
> - Org-mode is part of Emacs - this means that I can only accept patches
> 
> - I have never used git or a similar distributed tool - so I would
>    have to learn how to use them.

There are some benefits to distributed revision control. I used darcs for a
while to maintain my local patches against org-mode. IMHO the benefits are
mostly for other developers beside Carsten. They can more easily maintain their
local patches along with Carstens fast paced development. 

For Carsten there are probably not that many benefits, as he receives the
changes as patches and reworks them anyway. Maybe, say, he would trust Piotr
Zielinski (org-mouse) or David O'Toole (org-publish), then he could just pull
their newest version if they were to use the same system (that's many ifs).

As the development of org-mode is quite centered around Carsten anyway the
centralized model is probably an ok fit and not that much of a problem. External
developers can simply pull from CVS and keep their patches locally. As for the
adventurous there is also a mirror of the emacs CVS repository in arch and in
git (see the thread in http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/76259). A
little bit of googling will even reveal a mercurial repo at
http://hg.intevation.org/emacs.

HTH
Christian