Pushing after merge considered harmful

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu.org> writes:

>> It's an indictment of any non-trivial system.  There's always
>> emergent behavior, and to try and pass understanding along from the
>> top down is like trying to keep somebody alive by feeding them carbon
>> atoms.
>
> Oh, come on!  Try the Emacs Lisp Manual some day: it describes a
> vastly more complex system than Bazaar, and yet if you read a chapter
> on some issue, you get enough information to understand that issue
> from close to zero knowledge to the degree that you can write a
> non-trivial Lisp application.

I doubt that you can write a non-trivial Lisp application without
knowing what an atom, cons cell, list and object are. Moreover, if you
pretend to write a non-trivial Emacs extension, you need to learn first
about buffers, windows, the point, etc.

As a Emacs Lisp learner and frequent reader of the manual, I can assure
that its topics are not so free from fundamental dependencies as you
say.

[snip]

> except that the ``underlying understanding'' is nowhere to be
> gleaned except in random Web pages and discussions such as this one,

You are absolutely right here. Apparently most of the Bazaar
documentation seems to focus on a few especial cases and neglects
explaining the fundamentals, as if the documentation were written with
an hypothetical "Joe Average" in mind.

[snip]