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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > Given that Bazaar is GPL v2 and the contributor agreement is not
 > that onerous IMHO (e.g. you retain copyright to your contributed
 > changes), what's stopping the user community from stepping up to
 > help to maintain it, just like any other free software?

Unless it's changed recently, the Canonical contributor agreement for
Bazaar is quite asymmetric, giving rights to Canonical that other
contributors don't get.

 > If it's lack of interest, then okay, that happens with projects all the time.

As Lucy van Pelt would say, "THAT'S IT!!!"  The Emacs developers have
made it plain that they're not *sufficiently* interested in
contributing fixes to the problems they encounter in Bazaar, although
the one bug that they run into in the ELPA branch is a near show-
stopper.

Why the interest is insufficient, I'm not sure, but I suspect one big
problem is that Bazaar code is in a language unfamiliar to the most
likely hackers, and it contains many complex interrelated modules that
must be understood to do much of anything.  And at the time of the
decision, Bazaar was touted as a flagship product by Mark himself, so
it seemed unlikely that Emacs hackers would need to help feed the dog.