Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Xue Fuqiao writes:
 > On Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:34:31 -0500
 > Karl Fogel <address@hidden> wrote:
 > 
 > >  As far as I can tell, the only really meaningful way in which Bazaar
 > > is a "GNU project" is that GNU Emacs currently uses it.
 > 
 > IIRC Gnash, Mailman and Solfege also use it. (There are some other GNU
 > programs that use Bazaar, but I cannot remember.)

The head of the Mailman project is a Canonical employee.  IIRC, at the
time of the choice of VCS, he was working on Launchpad.  At least one
of the Gnash core developers was a Canonical employee assigned to
Bazaar development.  Those projects are more evidence of Canonical
connection than of GNU connection I would say.

On the contrary, at the time that Emacs chose Bazaar, Savannah's
support for Bazaar was rather poor; only a project that valued ideals
at almost any cost of productivity would choose it.  Savannah's
support for git was much better; the alternatives for projects that
just wanted the VCS to stay out of their way were really svn and git.
The difficulties Emacs faced would hardly have encouraged other to use
Bazaar for quite some time (it takes a couple of years for such a
reputation to disperse, let alone reverse).

On balance, usage by GNU projects is hardly evidence one way or
another for the GNU-ness of Bazaar.

But if the facts Karl reports about the website are current, that's
sad.  Except for the www.gnu.org redirect to canonical.com, those
defects were reported *and fixed* years ago.  The Bazaar pages were
updated at Richard's request to fix references to the "Linux System",
and to give the GNU Project at least as prominent visibility as the
commercial sponsors and users.  Karl's report indicates that many of
those defects have regressed.