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Emacs Needs To Move To GitHub, Says ESR

Posted by timothy on 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).

8 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Git, not Github by codl · · Score: 5, Informative

    ESR's original posting does not mention Github at all.

    1. Re:Git, not Github by Desler · · Score: 5, Informative

      "The article" (the first link which is to hypnosec's spam site) also says Github. ESR's post says merely Git.

  2. Git... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    He wants to move emacs to git and not to Github. Journalists...

    1. Re:Git... by Desler · · 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

  3. git, not GitHub by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The original source (ESR himself) never mentioned GitHub. Just git. Can people stop conflating the two please?

  4. Re:What's bzr? by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Funny

    How bizarre.

    The cathedral and the bizarre?

  5. Re:Surprised by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It has everything but still lacks decent editor

  6. What about Mercurial? by ebno-10db · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since VC wars are almost as much fun as language wars, and I've already donned my Nomex underwear, why not Mercurial? It isn't as popular as git, but it's not going to die either (e.g. Python project uses Hg). It seems that most people or organizations that have actually sat down and evaluated Hg vs. git have chosen Hg. Examples include Google's online repository and Fog Creek's Kiln. Both now also support git, but that's because of demand by users. Of course user demand is, at least from a marketing PoV, important, but why the user demand for git over Hg? Both have technical pros and cons (and fortunately for both the dev teams compete with each other), but Hg has always had a much better command line user interface, better GUI integration, and was well designed from the ground up to be portable, as opposed to a pile of shell scripts and C programs to run on Linux. Arguably git's use on the Linux kernel is a factor, but why? For all its visibility and importance, the Linux kernel is but one FOSS project, and the vast majority of FOSS devs don't work on it.

    Now for the statement that some will see as flamebait :-) but which is a sincere observation. I think the difference is the fanboi factor; people who think that git is the choice because it's from Linus, the ultimate cool kid. No, I don't think everyone who uses git does so because they're a fanboi. I suspect the main reason is going with that flow, but it's the fanbois who originally pushed that flow so hard. As your mother used to say, if all your friends decided to jump off a cliff, would you jump too? Vociferous debate welcome.

    Sincerely,
    Don Quixote