Re: bzr for Octave

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 06/14/2013 10:49 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 14 June 2013 11:21, Patrick Noffke<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > As long as you are considering changing things, I wanted to throw out
> > bazaar (http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/) as a candidate.  Perhaps
> > you've already considered bazaar in the past, or perhaps it is worth
> > considering again.
>
> bzr is sadly dead or moribund:
>
>      http://stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
>
> Its own developers don't recommend it anymore.

Interesting read.  I'm not sure what to take away from it because of it 
being more developer/programmer focused as opposed to user focused.


> I am truly sad about this, because bzr worked very hard to present a
> nice UI, which is more than can be sad than the current leading brand
> in DVCS. I like hg because it also tries to be nice to the user, even
> if it doesn't work as hard at it as bzr.

I agree with this Jordi.  My initial impression with Mercurial when John 
first proposed it was that it at least had this little front end of an 
automatically generated HTML interface to view diffs and log history. 
(Maybe git has that now as well.)  But the log history/revision graph 
only goes so far because trying to guess where, for example, mods from 
four or five months back might be is like a game of twenty questions: 
-60, -300, no +60, ehh +100, -60.  The best UI I've seen is a commercial 
non DVCS called perforce.  One can zoom in and out of the revision 
trace, descriptive merges and branches, merging editor to resolve 
conflicts is great.  Hg could use just a tad more convenience in this 
regard.


> > I didn't know until reading the sales pitch that you could associate
> > bugs with check-ins.  However there are other ways to do this, such as
> > trac.edgewall.org (where you can easily cross-reference bugs to
> > commits and vice-versa).  But maybe there's a way to associate the
> > savannah bugs with the commits, I'm not sure.
>
> This is something that we do manually right now by putting the bug
> number in the commit message. A real system would involve patching
> Savannah.

Savannah could also use a better search engine.  We're supposed to 
search for any bug reports similar to what we find before submitting a 
new one, but a search--as far as I know--doesn't seem limited to Octave. 
 Instead, it is every project in all of Savannah.

Dan