GNU Emacs Switches From CVS To Bazaar

kfogel writes "GNU Emacs, one of the oldest continuously developed free software projects around, has switched from CVS to Bazaar. Emacs's first recorded version-control commits date from August, 1985. Eight years later, in 1993, it moved to CVS. Sixteen years later, it is switching to Bazaar, its first time in a decentralized version control system. If this pattern holds, GNU Emacs will be in Bazaar for at least thirty-two years ..."

Comments

Re:Cathedral & the Bazaar? Irony?

[kfogel]

I can't remember if it was in the paper offhand, but in any case Emacs development is not really very cathedral-y.

what's new?; bazaar versus git

[bcrowell]

I started using emacs about 7 years ago, at which point the jokes about its feature creep ("nice OS, just needs a good editor," etc.) were already probably 20 years old. A few years ago I switched to mg, which is an emacs clone that is much more lightweight. The advantage of mg is that it loads immediately, and it has all the features I actually need. So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but -- what is currently happening in emacs development? New features? Better performance? Bug fixes? Polishing the brasswork? I'm honestly curious why it can't just go into the same kind of masterpiece-maintenance mode as some of Knuth's projects like Tex.

As far as bazaar, my impression is that it has had a much lower profile than git, and that its main selling point seems to be that it's supposed to be easier to use than git. Here is bazaar's explanation of why they think bazaar is good. Here is a similar sales job for git. Bazaar is used by ubuntu, sponsored by Canonical, and written in Python. You can get free bazaar-based hosting on Launchpad. Personally I've been happy with git.

Re:what's new?; bazaar versus git

[Anonymous Coward]

So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but -- what is currently happening in emacs development? New features? Better performance? Bug fixes? Polishing the brasswork? I'm honestly curious why it can't just go into the same kind of masterpiece-maintenance mode as some of Knuth's projects like Tex.

Check out org-mode. It's a fantastical set of code for managing things in emacs. It takes a bit of setting up, but it's very powerful and awesome. It's now included standard in emacs.

Re:Cathedral & the Bazaar? Irony?

[FlyingBishop]

It used to be. It since opened up in reaction to Raymond's paper. The power of words...

What Does It Need?

[Greyfox]

Emacs is Perfect...

Well not entirely perfect, but I have yet to find a better editor for editing code. I keep my resume as a big lisp data structure which Emacs can use to emit into any markup language I care to write an emitter for (Currently HTML and plain text, but I've been pondering writing a LaTeX one as well.)

What I'd like to see in Emacs:

• Threading. Currently everything runs in one big thread, so if you try to do too much processing with elisp the entire editor hangs up. There was a push a while back to replace elisp with Scheme, which would solve this handily, but that effort sort of petered out.
• Better integration with GUI applications. I want to use Emacs for my editor boxes in Firefox, notably.
• A better mail client, or better integration with a GUI mail client. Emacs together with Remembrance makes for an awesome mail combo, but every time I've tried to do Email in Emacs, it's been a huge effort to keep it going.

Ultimately it would be nifty if Emacs could work as well with the GUI components on my desktop as it can with text mode UNIX applications, but I suppose that might be asking too much of it.

Re:What Does It Need?

[tyroneking]

Have you thought of re-booting your Emacs addiction?

gVim was perfect - I used to write all of my documents in restructured text (gVim addon or rst2pdf to get PDFs) and all my emails with Mutt and Pine.

One day I switched to Freemind and Open Office for documents and Gmail for email ... so terribly un-geek like, but so much easier.

Never looked back.

You should give it a try.

Re:What Does It Need?

[tyroneking]

I regret nothing ;) the speed and agility one gains from 'light' but imperfect solutions is far better than the effort required to do anything else.

Plain text is best of course, but binary formats are easier for dimwit colleagues to understand - and I get paid quicker that way too. We both have problems diff'ing between binary formats so most of the time they don't bother and neither do I - no loss really because most documents have a very limited lifetime (especially when you use LiveLink :). It's kind of a devil's pact - I promise to write documents in MS Word if you promise never to ask me to figure out the history of changes or keep older versions.

Email is the same story really- I never really searched through past email, but I did lose archives during sync operations and missed having access to email when at the office. Gmail wins this battle every time. Another devil's pact - I promise to reply to emails quickly wherever I am if you promise never to ask me to remember what we talked about.

It sounds a bit lackadaisical - and it is - because life's really like that - and in the real world of the idiots no one even backs up their computers - so we are already on to a winner! And in the real world it's always better to have an immediate if imperfect (but rosier) recall of past events than it is to say 'yeah, well let me just go and grep that for you' because not only does that sound dorky, but no one will thank you for remembering the truth (not if you want to be president that is :)

OK, so when it gets serious, i.e. when I start coding (because emails, documents, spreadsheets are just the pointless stuff that stops me from coding) then it's plain text, Python and Mercurial SCM every single time. No argument. Colleagues can't understand how Mercurial works? Then I tell them to find another job. Another devil's pact ... let me use my own tools and I will write good software for you.

Basically, aside from coding work, life's too short to worry about retracing your steps --- it's much easier (and rosier) to try and remember what you 'think' happened and go from there.

One past client had a rule that all email was auto-deleted after two months ... sound horrific, but boy did it stop all the 'you said' 'he said' arguments... (also, stopped any horrible litigation :)

The killer app in all these years, as I transition from thinking like a coder to thinking like a mild alcoholic, has been Freemind, which helps me organise my thoughts and tasks but is practically useless for keeping a history of changes (ok, so it does, but the whole 'history' keeping doesn't work in mind maps). The thing about Freemind is that keeping information in a mind map somehow etches that same information in your brain - so I can remember almost exactly what's in my Freemind project map.

So, in summary, drink vodka...

Re:32 years?

[shentino]

You should see how much of a fuss it's making with the ubuntu mailing lists.

At any rate, bazaar is politically entrenched because it's the only officially supported RCS and it's backed by the corporate might of canonical.

I'm not aware of any particular merits or demerits of either system.