Apologies

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 04/06/2010 12:13, Ben Finney wrote:
> I think it's unfortunate that the discussion was blocked between the two
> forums. It seemed that there were a number of misconceptions on both
> sides about the other VCS tool, that can only really be addressed when
> such a cross-project discussion occurs.

Indeed.
The problem with VCSes, as pointed out in the other thread, is that they evolve quickly, 
and lot of the "knowledge" people has on "the other VCSes" is based on articles founds on 
the Net.
These articles might have been accurate and pertinent in their time, but lot of people 
(including myself, sometime) fail to look at their date (when it is explicit: sometime, in 
Wordpress blogs, we miss the year!) and we judge a software on its state of two years ago.

That's why Bazaar still drags its reputation of being slow, Mercurial of not handling 
correctly renames, etc. even if these issues have been (mostly) addressed already.
After all, these shortcomings are known by developers which attempt to (and success in) 
address(ing) them with time.

On the other hand, I find hard to use correctly a VCS like Bazaar, partly because there 
are so many workflows, lot of them just not usable in my daily usage. Let alone to master 
it... So it even harder to keep track of progress, capabilities and evolution of several 
VCSes. I know some people can do (have to...) do that here, but it isn't simple anyway.
That's why such cross-discussion, when made without passion nor partiality, is rich in 
information and myth-busting... :-)

This passion is understandable, each party defends their product, and perceive the others 
as concurrent, ie. a user has to choose between them, and will probably settle for quite 
some time with their choice.
What is funny, or sad, is that there is no big business based this concurrency. Well, not 
like Apple vs. Google (Android) or Office Word vs. WordPerfect (in its time)...

-- 
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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