RCS Comparison table and ease of use

[Martin Pool]

On  7 Feb 2007, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:

> I have personal feelings about Bazaar's ease-of-use, but as a main
> member of the community I feel it is shameless self promotion to edit
> that line.

I think it's fine to say what you like about Bazaar, and totally
appropriate for the web site to be self promotion.  

However I don't think this kind of comparison table is (any more) the
best way to do it: we're not always up to date on what other systems can
do, and in any case our comments won't be seen as unbiased.  Also it's a
bit ridiculous to reduce something like "ease of use" to yes/no/maybe.

I can see some value in pages explaining how you do X in Bazaar, or why
we do it one way rather than another.  (And we have several of those of
course.)

Anyhow, regardless of whether it is a good way for us to communicate, it
tends to cause long debates pointless debates, or people to unilaterally
change it.

> If you as a user and not a developer feel differently. Please update our
> Wiki. Even better if you can have a blog post that describes how easy it
> has been for you to use Bazaar.

As the sign at my favourite grocer says, "if you like us, tell your
friends; if you don't, tell us."  So by all means blog, or post here
on the list about things you think could be better.  I think feedback
may not get enough attention if it's posted to the wiki.

Other people have tables like this anyhow, but I find them much less
interesting than narratives, and I think that tells us something too.

> In some ways I would rather remove that entry, because it is a very
> subjective evaluation. Instead, I would rather just have a collection of
> links at the end of the document where people have compared different
> RCSs and discussed their feelings. People can read them, and get their
> own impressions.

I agree, something like that would be better.  Since no one else seems
to be sticking up for it I'll cut out the table.

> (Another ease-of-use with darcs.  How do I get my tree back to an exact
> state in the past if I didn't tag it? Is that even possible? I have the
> feeling darcs developers don't feel like this is an important operation.
> And probably quite a few people agree.)

You cannot.

-- 
Martin