Usage discussion from the GNU Emacs project.

[Ben Finney]

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

> If Bazaar doesn't care, I don't care.

Who is “Bazaar” in this usage? You make reference many times to a party
that (to me at least) is ill-defined, so I'm having trouble knowing to
whom your proposal is intended to apply.

> But bzr is going to get a bad rep in a high profile, vocal community
> if something isn't done about the way things are going. One can only
> push back against RMS so far; I've gone as far as I dare, and I
> suspect that (as usual) he's already stopped reading my posts to
> emacs-devel.

I don't know what you expect the Bazaar folk to do, if the Savannah
tools are stuck at Bazaar version 1.5.

> RMS, on the other hand, is pushing hard to set up some of the worst
> possible workflows as "recommended" in exchange for being able to keep
> the familiar and some simplicity in the initial "checkout" (or
> no-quotes checkout, since lightweight checkouts have caught his
> fancy!)

Okay. It seems you're wanting some other people to speak with RMS or
otherwise change his mind. So who has RMS's ear on this? How can
whichever people you're referring to get into the position of changing
his mind?

> What I'm complaining about here is bzr fans complaining about the "bzr
> is slow" meme. Something needs to be done about that.

Well, for a long time, there was significant merit in such a claim. A
lot of energy went into making newer versions of Bazaar so that claim
could be falsified.

> There's clearly a "bzr doesn't need to be effectively set up because
> users don't care very much" meme incubating at Savannah. That's really
> not good.

Perhaps it's not sufficiently clear. Where is this meme evident?

Given that it's evident, I agree that's not good. What exactly are you
asking to be done about it?

> I don't know anywhere except my personal host that doesn't provide a
> git server.  Access to git smart server is easy to get.  Why access to
> bzr smart server is less so, maybe it's just Savannah?  Please tell me
> it's just Savannah and I'll feel a lot better.

This does seem to be a problem; I've never (mostly for lack of a
dead-simple method) figured out how to set up a Bazaar smart server.

Yet simultaneously you're also saying that people need to “get used to”
the situation where Savannah is not running anything later than an
early-2008 version of Bazaar. Are you proposing that this can this be
addressed retroactively in Bazaar 1.5?

> It doesn't matter to Emacs if he sticks with Bazaar; Bazaar is a good
> system that is only going to get better. It's the bad PR for Bazaar
> that I care about, and the bad CVS-like workflows that are being
> recommended (at least, RMS is thinking that way) as the way to get
> started with Bazaar.
>
> I suppose a lot of why I'm presenting this way is my frustration with
> trying to get a good plan for the transition set up over at
> emacs-devel. Maybe RMS is unusual, but then *exactly* the same
> conversations were had at Python. "What do you mean I have to set up a
> local repository? That's complex! The centralized workflow using
> 'checkout --lightweight' looks like the way to go to me. Boy is bzr
> slow. Good lord, Debian stable is on bzr 0.99.[1]" Ad nauseum.

I have a lot of sympathy with all of this, and share your frustration
with the bad PR. Against that, though, in the time since the Python
developers began their VCS deliberations, I've seen great strides made
in Bazaar's behaviour and in the documentation.

The situation seems significantly improved, *if* those efforts at
improvement can actually be taken advantage of. Sticking with Bazaar 1.5
on Savannah isn't going to make many Emacs developers happy; it seems
you agree.

No doubt more can be done. What specifically are you proposing needs to
be done, and by whom?

-- 
 \             “I put contact lenses in my dog's eyes. They had little |
  `\   pictures of cats on them. Then I took one out and he ran around |
_o__)                                      in circles.” —Steven Wright |
Ben Finney