Re: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Dmitry Gutov writes:

 > If I found the right discussion, these two messages:
 > 
 > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/90798/focus=92070
 > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/90798/focus=91330
 > 
 > seem to indicate that Bazaar was considered a good enough tech at the
 > time, and that politics were coming second, or at least were not an
 > overriding factor.

I read your citations as indicating exactly the opposite.  Especially
in context of the actual discussion, where the technical demands for
"good enough" were minimized.

In any case, here's the original thread started by Eric Raymond, where
Richard says from the get-go that the determining factor is GNU-ness:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/85669/focus=85669

 > If Bazaar had been in bad shape even then, I don't see anyone
 > mentioning that in the discussion (admittedly, I haven't read every
 > message).

It was known at the time that Bazaar's current version was slow and
repos were bloated.  (Part of why Python rejected it in March 2009, a
year later.  See http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#decision and
the following discussion.)  The thread starting at msg 85669 on Gmane
also provides plenty of evidence that Bazaar performed poorly compared
to git and Mercurial.

The fact is that Bazaar is much better now than it was then.  It's
quite usable in a project the size of Emacs these days.[1]  That's why
I say you're not going to change Richard's mind without much stronger
reasons than any I know of at this date.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Assuming you haven't already decided that you need git. ;-)