bazaar/mercurial meeting

[Kevin Smith]

On Tue, 2006-05-23 at 14:44 +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> As participants in this project it's easy to see all the points of
> difference and reasons why anything like a merge would be hard.  But to
> an outside observer it may be yet another case where it seems a shame
> there's so much duplicated effort between open projects (emacs vs xemacs
> for example).

As an outsider who did detailed evaluations of several tools, including
hg, I can certainly see both sides. 

Every project has to focus on some attributes, and allow others to
suffer as a result. Usability. Scalability. Portability. You know the
story. If bzr and hg have different fundamental values, then it makes
sense to keep them separate.

One interesting outcome of the meeting might be for each project to
clarify its own goals, relative to the other project, such as:
  - bzr tries to work really well with non-CGI http servers
  - bzr doesn't lose any functionality on MS Windows FAT32 systems
  - hg puts a higher value on speed when working with huge trees
  - hg...
  - ...

Something along those lines would help the world understand why the two
projects shouldn't merge. It would also help folks decide which system
is more likely to meet their specific needs. When I move to a DVCS, it
will probably be bzr specifically because of those first two bullet
points. Obviously the third bullet point is critical to many folks (but
not to me).

Just a thought/observation.

Kevin