Launchpad svn/git imports failure causes

[Russel Winder]

Martin,

On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 17:06 +0100, Martin (gzlist) wrote:
[ . . . ]
> This approach of treating some platforms as second-class and
> discouraging non-portable features doesn't really seem to be working
> for symlinks. Pretty much always the right answer is "don't version
> symlinks if you claim to be a cross-platform project", but instead we
> get things like <https://bugs.launchpad.net/sikuli/+bug/586709> which
> gets turned into a dupe of our bug 81689 rather than getting that
> straight forward advice, then this cute little follow up from antatoly
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/sikuli/+bug/634791> which could be
> paraphrased as "switch to mercurial".

I fear some of this may be my fault.  The context is the SCons developer
and user lists.  I am trying to foment the use of DVCS for add-on SCons
tools -- traditionally all tools were in the core distribution or posted
on a wiki.  I really like Bazaar/Launchpad for these and so have been
using them (cf. http://www.scons.org/wiki/ToolsIndex), though
Git/GitHub, Mercurial/BitBucket are other possibilities.  However I
really like the fact that Launchpad supports teams as well as
individuals, whereas GitHub and BitBucket are all about individuals.

Anatoly, in response to one of my emails, raised the issue of the Sikuli
problem https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/sikuli/+question/100764 and
implied that no Ubuntu developers cared about Windows -- the point is
nothing to do with SCons or my email, but he spotted I was somewhat
knowledgeable about Bazaar, I have pushed Bazaar previously on the SCons
lists, though the decision has now been made that SCons core will switch
from Subversion to Mercurial.  I berated him a bit about over-inferring,
i.e. no Bazaar developer would have seen the question, and that he
should make a posting associated with Bazaar so that the right people
saw the problem and so could investigate.  Clearly
https://bugs.launchpad.net/sikuli/+bug/634791 was his response to that,
which actually annoys me somewhat as it doesn't address the right
problem, and isn't aimed at the right audience.

Anyway, the fact that there is an issue is now a topic in the right
audience.  Do we have any idea what the actual problem is that Anatoly
is seeing with Sikuli?  Is it simply that the committers have assumed
symlink capability which Windows fails to have?  Is there a lesson here
for Bazaar?  Can Mercurial really get round these issues or is Anatoly's
suggestion just a "peeved hack" that may not solve the problem?

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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