Re: delaying new website after 2.14

[Jonathan Kulp]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> However, I very much argued in favour of bazaar, for the very
> reasons you cite.  The bazaar project has as usability, ease of
> use and good documentation as a prime goal -- and also does
> very well in these areas -- much unlike git.  Although git has
> improved a bit here and there, its commands and esp. arguments
> are still a complete mess, whereas bzr has made grand strides
> performance-wise.
>
> Since we switched to GIT I have been looking into getting a bzr
> mirror up for our git sources at launchpad.net, from time to time,
> a new effort just failed.

I can offer some doc-contributor, non-programmer perspective here.

I recently wrote a manpage for a project managed by bazaar, and 
while some of it seemed easier, more intuitive, I found that it 
didn't handle merging very well.  For example, after making a 
change and committing it, upon the next pull it would tell me 
there was a conflict, then I ran the command to fix the conflict 
and it would say "conflict resolved successfully," (great!) only 
to have exactly the same conflict arise next time I pulled, even 
after I made no changes at all.  Very frustrating.  At least when 
this happens on git I can pick a spot to reset my branch to. 
Still it might be worth trying bzr with Lilypond, as it's possible 
my problems were noob-related.  Right now I'm more comfortable 
with git, if you can believe that. :) bzr has many of the same 
commands (or the same sorts of commands) and I think would cause 
the same sorts of problems for doc contributors who aren't used to 
using *any* kind of revision control system.

Another observation: the command to create a patch on bzr is prone 
to mistakes. It took me a few tries to get it right.  "git 
format-patch origin" is much easier than what you type on bzr. 
Example: here's the command I had to type make a patch for the 
manpage for this project:

  bzr diff -r29..30 sap.1 > manpage.patch

Now, it worked, but to me this is harder than git. It's sort of an 
important part of the process, too, if we want doc contributors 
making their own patches.

my summary: bzr might be better-looking (at first), but it's not 
as smart as git and not really that much easier to use, at least 
for the things someone like me does.

Also it's very awkward to type "bzr" on a U.S. keyboard--a minor 
thing but annoying nonetheless. It'd be easier on a German layout 
or maybe some others.

Jon
--
Jonathan Kulp
http://www.jonathankulp.com