Re: Basic Bazaar guide for Emacs hackers.

[Karl Fogel]

Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:
>>  > I have no problem at all deleting the document if it damages the
>>  > transition to Bazaar. But so far, your reasons for doing it are not
>>  > convincing at all to me and just demonstrates a misunderstanding of
>>  > the demography of Emacs and their current VC practices.
>>
>> On the other hand, how many VCS transitions have you managed for
>> Emacs-sized projects?  I've done two so far.  I can say from
>> experience the cost of support is not polynomial in extra workflows
>> during the transition.
>
> Okay. Your experience trumps over my reasoning. Page deleted.
>
> But from now on I don't feel obliged to help supporting those who think
> that they have better things to do than learning a new way of doing
> something that worked fine for the last 20 years :-)

Hmm.  I think we have been editing simultaneously!

Here's what I just did:

  * Removed all the alternate scenarios and stacked-branches talk from
    http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs, leaving just the one
    workflow for regular contributors.  I hope this simplifies the page
    a lot, and makes it clear that it is intended to give a single,
    recommended workflow.

  * For those alternate scenarios, we now refer out to a new page:
    http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsCasualDevs, which strongly
    recommends people to use the regular workflow, but describes a
    couple of alternate ways for those who really want that.  Because it
    still makes it clear that we recommend the "regular contributor"
    workflow, I think this will not lead to confusion.

  * On http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrQuickStartForEmacsDevs, I've
    moved the recommendation to try the "regular contributor" workflow
    (i.e., BzrForEmacsDevs) to the top, and strengthened it.  Oscar, I
    hope that was okay, and that you feel the wording there is accurate.
    If not, please tweak.  I did my work in the wiki instead of the
    mailing list only because that seemed the easiest way to communicate
    my edits, not because I meant them to be the final word.

I think our documentation is mostly consistent and non-confusing now.

We have three pages, but two of them point clearly to BzrForEmacsDevs as
the recommended workflow, and that page refers out to the other two
where appropriate.  We can also manually point a person to either of
those other two if and when that person balks at using BzrForEmacsDevs
(for lack of time or whatever reason).

So when we do the switchover, if we point to

  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BzrForEmacsDevs

as the place to start, that should work, and will nudge people toward
adopting a dVCS way of working from the start.  But those who don't want
that have other options prepared for them.

Does this sound sane?

Continued improvements to any of the docs welcome, of course.

-Karl