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.