Emacs Needs To Move To GitHub, Says ESR

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Emacs Needs To Move To GitHub, Says ESR

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 2, 2014 @02:30AM from the this-way-to-the-bazaar dept.

hypnosec writes "Eric S. Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has recommended that Emacs should move to another version control system like GitHub, as bzr is dying. In an email, Raymond highlighted the key reasons why he believes that Emacs should move. Raymond said that bzr is moribund; its dev list has flatlined; and most of Canonical's in-house projects have already abandoned bzr and moved to GitHub. ESR believes that bzr's codebase is sufficiently mature to be used as a production tool, but he does mention that continuing to use the revision control system will have 'social and signaling effects damaging to Emacs's prospects.'" Update: 01/06 20:50 GMT by U L : ESR did not suggest Github the proprietary hosting platform for git, but rather git the version control system. Which is actually already available on Savannah (the bazaar repository is automatically synced with the git repository).

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Git, not Github by codl · 2014-01-02 02:34 · Score: 5, Informative

ESR's original posting does not mention Github at all.
1. Re:Git, not Github by Desler · 2014-01-02 02:45 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  "The article" (the first link which is to hypnosec's spam site) also says Github. ESR's post says merely Git.
GNU Savannah supports git by byolinux · 2014-01-02 02:35 · Score: 4, Informative

No need to move to a proprietary hosting service like Github.
I wrote about this previously: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/savannah

--
Join the Free Software Foundation
Git... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-02 02:36 · Score: 5, Informative

He wants to move emacs to git and not to Github. Journalists...
1. Re:Git... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-02 02:39 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  "hypnosec" is not a journalist. It's someone who's spamming his regurgitation blog posts to drive ad impressions.
2. Re:Git... by Desler · 2014-01-02 02:46 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Ravi Mandalia is "hypnosec".
3. Re:Git... by Desler · 2014-01-02 02:48 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  To add, Ravi Mandali's first version of his spam site was called "Hypno Security" which just basically regurgitated a couple of paragraphs of other people's news as "articles" and started spamming it here.
  http://www.freelancer.com/u/hypnosec.html
git, not GitHub by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-02 02:36 · Score: 5, Informative

The original source (ESR himself) never mentioned GitHub. Just git. Can people stop conflating the two please?
Re:What's bzr? by dominux · 2014-01-02 03:08 · Score: 3, Informative

it pre-dates git by a year, it was the NiH version of cvs and svn. Bzr was doing useful stuff before anyone realised Git would ever be used for anything other than the Linux kernel source tree. That isn't to say that NiH isn't sometimes a good thing, and that Canonical do daft things from time to time, but bzr wasn't a NiH reaction to Git.
Re:Pretty sure... by mellon · 2014-01-02 03:35 · Score: 3, Informative

A heretic uses XEmacs. An apostate doesn't take the time to install Emacs where it is not available, instead using vi. A blasphemer suggests that emacs and vi are essentially interchangeable, denying emacs' uniqueness and primacy. All three prefer emacs; only pagans and barbarians prefer something else.
Re:What's bzr? by DrXym · 2014-01-02 04:00 · Score: 3, Informative
Git seems to be perpetually in preview on Windows but in practice it works relatively well. There are quite a few front ends for it if you hate the command line.
The biggest issues I have with it are:
- Line ending conversion is a massive pain in the arse. Windows is CRLF, Linux is LF. Msysgit asks during installation what line ending conversion policy to use. If you get it wrong, you'll see spurious issues with files marked as modified when no difference is visible. The best advice I can give is set core.autocrlf to false when you install msysgit so that line endings are left alone. You can do stuff with a file called .gitattributes to turn off line ending conversion in the repo itself but JGit (the Java pure impl of Git in Eclipse) doesn't actually bother to honour the settings in that file.
- Performance is a bit poor. You won't notice in small repos but when the repo is 10,000+ files, simple things like "git status" can sit there for minutes. MSYS has an inefficient lstat and performance becomes noticeably in Git as a consequence. An SSD helps a lot, but that's no consolation for devs who can't ask for one.
- 260 char MAX_PATH imposes restrictions on path length that the fs itself could cope with.
Nothing is a deal breaker. I think Git on Windows works as well as most other source control systems when its up and going and comes with its own advantages that compel its use for software development. I wouldn't use it for document management though - something like Subversion would be better for that.
Re:What's bzr? by Lemming+Mark · 2014-01-02 04:08 · Score: 3, Informative

I thought there was a fairly complex history here, since the current bzr was (I thought) bzr-ng originally, an alternative to some original Bazaar tool. And I thought that *that* came from GNU Arch, which (speaking loosely) I gathered wasn't well understood or enjoyable to use. I don't know how much of the current behaviour dates back that far, though, so there may not be too much in common now!
Re:What's bzr? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-02 10:40 · Score: 2, Informative

260 characters is a Windows limitation ("C://" + 256). To get longer paths you need to switch to the Unicode-based API, and change the format of path strings. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx