Usage discussion from the GNU Emacs project.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Executive summary:
- Status: There is no real experience of Emacs on Bazaar, and AFAIK no
  experience of Bazaar use on Savannah.
- Docs from Emacs transition: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs.
- Docs Emacs wants improved: Survival Guide: bzr-for-cvs-users.html.

Ian Clatworthy writes:

 > Are there many GNU projects using Bazaar with Savannah now?

Probably only Emacs, actually.  A "large handful" of people on the
Emacs list have mentioned using Launchpad for their personal branches
of other projects, but nobody knows anything about Savannah, and there
is apparently nobody who knows how Savannah is actually going to
manage the bzr repositories.  (Of course they have a pretty good idea,
but "we'll have to think about that" or "ask Savannah-hackers about
that" is a pretty common response.)

The Emacs people haven't even thought about how to handle "sandbox"
branches yet, although I've raised the issue with Stefan so something
will be decided pretty soon.

 > Perhaps we could harvest their experience? Or is Emacs so large that
 > it's a different kettle of fish?

There is no experience yet.  People who already use Bazaar have
experience with other projects, other hosts, not Emacs, and definitely
not Emacs on Savannah (whose master repo has been changing every few
days because of improvements in the conversion from CVS).

You might also want to look at http://emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs.

What would be really helpful for Emacs would be a decent "Bazaar for
CVS Users" document.  The POV taken there is hardly useful; it's
really not very useful to tell developers (the principal audience IMO)
to get a bare checkout from Bazaar.  Nobody *wants* to use CVS any
more, so it's not like "you're being forced to use Bazaar when you
really want to use CVS".  The POV should be "here's how to survive the
early days, and then take progressively learn to take advantage of
Bazaar's features."  Eg, BzrForEmacsDevs recommends using a stacked
branch (vs. checkout) so that `bzr commit' works for non-committer
developers, which eases the transition from beta tester to one-off
contributor.

I'm not sure that BzrForEmacsDevs would be a good place to start for
that.  For one thing, there are a lot of people with dVCS experience
on emacs-devel -- old Archies will remember Stefan Monnier and Miles
Bader, for sure, and there are many git users, a bunch of people with
Darcs experience, and so on.  At the other pole, the people who *only*
know CVS are basically only interested in a transition with a minimum
impact on their workflow, they could care less about theoretical
benefits as long as they are left alone.

N.B.  At this point I think it's fair to say that Karl and I are the
principal authors of BzrForEmacsDevs.  Caveat Lector.