Emacs Needs To Move To GitHub, Says ESR 252
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).
Re:Git, not Github (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GNU Savannah supports git (Score:1, Insightful)
Exactly. His question is as dumb as asking "Why doesn't the FSF recommend Windows?".
Insufficient Resources (Score:2, Insightful)
Github doesn't have the resources to host something that bloated.
Re:git, not GitHub (Score:5, Insightful)
The original source (ESR himself) never mentioned GitHub. Just git. Can people stop conflating the two please?
C'mon, man, get with the times. Having 'protocols' with 'definitions' that allow for 'multiple vendor-neutral implementations' is so totally outdated, man. Everybody knows that the future is snappily named proprietary services dependent on a single vendor with a nonsensical business model, ideally accessible only through an iPhone app!
What about Mercurial? (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
What prospects of Emacs left to be damaged? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there still any prospect at all? I left 5 years ago because they stopped improving anything for a decade.
A decade ago it was comparably decent IDE for Java and C++, today it's nothing thanks to incomplete project management UI, incomplete file tab support, and over-reliance on ctags which can't really understand syntax and parse things properly, and their inability to work on on-the-fly static code-analysis, which requires basic threading support that (still) isn't done.
the same could be said for Vim as well. While both remain very efficient text editors, they no longer matter because it's far more important to study and write correct code than to writing code faster, and other IDEs have improved on such parts drastically these years.
Re:GNU Savannah supports git (Score:1, Insightful)
Entitlement much? Why should they have to continually update some 5.5 year old article?
Re:The real question is about Emacs (Score:3, Insightful)
Emacs ... byzantine key combos
What are you talking about? It's not Emacs' fault that some later programs decided to break compatibility.