Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Matthew D. Fuller writes:

 > Well, sure.  You can do anything by creating a new history and
 > browbeating people into considering it the authoritative one  8-}

It's not about creating new history, though.  It's about presenting
the old one in a way which reveals the big truth that the observers
want to know, rather than a slew of small truths that nobody really
cares about (until the investigative reporter from National TV shows
up, and uses them to raise her ratings along with the ad revenue of
her station, and in the process convince the Budget Office that you're
all a bunch of wankers and you lose your funding, of course).

It *is* nice to have a bisectable history.  There are two ways to get
it.  One is to never commit until you are sure you have a sufficiently
clean version.  The other is to commit when you feel like
checkpointing, then edit out the commits that don't say anything
interesting, or are broken.  (I think of this as a sort of "persistent
undo" function of my editing system, rather than as part of the VCS,
even though it's implemented via the VCS.)

 > > I certainly doubt that those who want "true rename support"[1] would
 > > consider it an advantage.

I'm specifically referring to git's sloppy "detect it in hindsight"
approach there, which isn't useful for parallel import support.

 > True.  OTOH, it also overlaps into things like parallel import
 > support (after all, that's just a special case of pointing back in
 > time and saying 'Oh, X is the same as Y').

Indeed.  That kind of thing would be nice.