Bazaar Explorer prototype showing suggested Bazaar menu for IDEs

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ben Finney writes:
 > "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

 > I think the context of *when* something gains mind-share is important.
 > At the time when MS Word and MS Excel became popular, I would argue that
 > they did provide significant HCI improvements over the competition,
 > which had become stagnant and ossified.

The users of Word Perfect certainly didn't think so.  But be that as
it may, the important thing is

 > Russel's criterion only has to apply to a technology trying to
 > *gain* mind-share; having gained it, that advantage doesn't need to
 > be maintained for the technology to retain its mind-share.

Right.  As a follower, you have to be somewhat usable to gain
mindshare, but that's neither necessary nor sufficient to maintain it.
Lack of, or actually bad, GUI can hurt Bazaar very badly.  But a good
GUI at best will open some doors.

 > Though there are still, IIUC, a number of lieutenants who still
 > communicate via patches or an $OTHERVCS-to-Git gateway. Or is my
 > information out of date there?

As far as I know, that's true.  But those are the people who in
general don't care anywhere near as much about UI as they do about
functionality; they build their own UIs.  What matters is the casual
users of kernel repo or X.org, and the large number of people who
about learning new VCSes the way you feel about maintaining website
IDs. ;-)

 > I dearly hope this is true; I find Bazaar's workflow models to be more
 > "correct" (and certainly more flexible) than those of any other VCS
 > tools I've tried, and trust that with a strong core the form will follow
 > function and prove its worth.

Hm.  To be honest, now that hg has mq and bzr has loom, I don't really
see a difference in the workflows that *can* be supported, with help
from GUIs and scripts.  I worry that Bazaar's native flexibility comes
at the expense of an unnecessarily complex and expensive
implementation, not to mention user confusion.