GNU Emacs Finally Switching Over To Git From Bazaar

[Pajn]

IDEs are graphical interfaces - in general they can't replicate the full power of a terminal command without being extremely clunky.
Most IDEs simply provide an interface for the most common commands - enough to enable seamless committing, but not enough to eliminate the use of a native interface entirely.

Of course not, but they provide enough to handle the usual workflow, commit, branch, merge, stage, push, pull, rebase and simple reverts.
They also give a nice inline overview of what changes you have done.

If I need to add, remove or change a remote, make some advanced revert or something like that I have to fallback on the CLI though.

[kpedersen]

I remember when everyone was saying that cvs is dead, use bzr. Ironically I know a few large projects still using cvs so not only was it around before bzr but it also outlived bzr haha.

That said, I did assume that git was going to be another trendy version control system that was gonna become uncool and disappear any time soon. That does not seem to be the case so one day if I am unable to use svn, git will certainly be my next choice (even if the process of setting up a git server is less elegant and encapsulated than svn).

[Ardje]

That said, I did assume that git was going to be another trendy version control system that was gonna become uncool and disappear any time soon. That does not seem to be the case so one day if I am unable to use svn, git will certainly be my next choice (even if the process of setting up a git server is less elegant and encapsulated than svn).

Actually: I have used cvs (good), svn (buggy at that time,could not handle a kernel), and git.
And I have set up servers. From all versioning systems git is the only one that is really easy. You can use plain ssh (we don't really want that) or just install gitolite. If you use gitolite you can let the users setup repo's themselves and let them manage permissions on those repo's. As for workflow, git really rocks. To be clear: git always uses ssh, the plain git protocol should not be used (as the git documentation will tell you).
And don't forget: a git server is only a common place to exchange commits. You don't need it, you can directly push or pull another persons local repository (You can push just as long as you push a branch that is not checked out). But the common place does make it really easy to manage.

[blackiwid]

IDEs are graphical interfaces - in general they can't replicate the full power of a terminal command without being extremely clunky.
Most IDEs simply provide an interface for the most common commands - enough to enable seamless committing, but not enough to eliminate the use of a native interface entirely.

then look at magit, and does it matter what vcs you use when u have to do a thin 1 time per year, that cant be done with that interface? if its horrifily worse of course but if its pretty similar who cares.

Again if a project is dieing like every canonical projekt, thats something different.

[Ibidem]

Regarding git vs hg: ESR said on his blog that Mercurial was his personal favorite $VCS because of the UI, but he advocated git because it is far more widely used.

bzr wasn't just a Canonical project, though that's how it started; GNU adopted it shortly after release.
Short history: Tom Lord wrote "arch" in 2001, which became GNU Arch; Canonical forked it as Bazaar ("baz") in 2004; Canonical began a redesign-from-scratch called "Bazaar-NG" (bzr) in 2005, about the time Tom Lord resigned as Arch maintainer and recommended adopting baz; Canonical released bzr 1.0 in 2007. In Feb. 2008, bzr became a GNU project.

git is unlikely to die, partly for the same reason that cvs (and maybe svn) aren't likely to go away: it's been widely adopted for very large projects, so there's a degree of inertia.

git: linux, dragonflybsd, libreoffice, KDE, Gnome, X, numerous smaller projects
hg: opensolaris, illumos (git mirror), Mozilla projects
svn: freebsd
svn mirrored to git: apache, llvm
cvs: openbsd, netbsd, pkgsrc (all have third-party mirrors)
cvs mirrored to git: gcc, glibc, ...

[Cyber Killer]

Git is popular because Git is popular, on the end user side it's clunky, has strange cli commands, forces a totally different workflow than anyone who used other/older vcs' is used to, doesn't have a good gui for all platforms and many more user-side problems. Bazaar on the other hand is very straightforward to use and can be given to anyone who knows how to use Subversion and be ready to work in 5 minutes. Even Mercurial is more friendly than Git.

Anyway, lack of new versions doesn't mean the tool is dead, the current version works ok, doesn't have many bugs, and if it takes another 10 years to get an update, I don't care, cause it works for me (it's even better if new versions don't come too often). I'm sticking to Bazaar for my projects.

As much as I dislike Canonical, bzr is the one thing that they did pretty much good.

[blackiwid]

As much as I dislike Canonical, bzr is the one thing that they did pretty much good.

svn is not the ideal interface, like I read maybe wrong out of your words I used svn and was really happy about git, and not only because of distributed stuff, there were ways to do that in svn too. branching and merging was the pure horror and you could make so much wrong, what I then did. Maybe I did it wrong, all possible but that there are ways you could do it extremly wrong so easiely was bad.

And there is another thing, yes speed does matter, and mercurial and git are close together for most stuff, but bzr is way way behind on that point.
If you use it alone with no other developers go ahead use it, but I use VCS often to share/work together with other people there would be such a tool a bad idea.

But it does not matter so much what u use at the backend, except the first pull with something like Git-Bzr-NG will take longer for the normal git user.
thats also one big advantage of git at least over svn and the older ones, but again it will not be so straight forward to use then having it on central repos and the local repos.

[Cyber Killer]

svn is not the ideal interface, like I read maybe wrong out of your words I used svn and was really happy about git, and not only because of distributed stuff, there were ways to do that in svn too. branching and merging was the pure horror and you could make so much wrong, what I then did. Maybe I did it wrong, all possible but that there are ways you could do it extremly wrong so easiely was bad.

I'm not a fan of svn, but it's a known interface, bzr (and hg) uses the same, but fixes the stuff that svn had broken. And a familiar interface and workflow (bzr supports multiple workflows, a one that works like git too) is the whole world, when you need to bring a new person into the project.

And there is another thing, yes speed does matter, and mercurial and git are close together for most stuff, but bzr is way way behind on that point.
If you use it alone with no other developers go ahead use it, but I use VCS often to share/work together with other people there would be such a tool a bad idea.

But it does not matter so much what u use at the backend, except the first pull with something like Git-Bzr-NG will take longer for the normal git user.
thats also one big advantage of git at least over svn and the older ones, but again it will not be so straight forward to use then having it on central repos and the local repos.

Bzr being slow is a myth, that was true in the 1.x versions, since 2.x the speed is ok. There's a really good article about bzr myths here: https://unspecified.wordpress.com/20...better-than-x/ - it turns out really good when you do some proper benchmarks.

I deal with Git at work so I got some experience with it too (I actually admin our git repos server too), and the amount of problems that devs have (not to mention the testers) who used svn all their lives is sometimes overwhelming. It looks to me that people don't really care about Git, they care about Github, they only want a fancy website to manage code branches and pull requests. I see Github at the core of this problem - it got way popular without most people understanding what it is. Every week I see some new github "projects" with a single commit, used plainly as file storage.

On the other hand - why can't we have 3 popular dvcses? People always insist on limiting their choice, 1 of something "has to" be the most popular, be perceived as "the best" and all alternatives (despite being good enough too) get shoved aside.

[blackiwid]

I'm not a fan of svn, but it's a known interface, bzr (and hg) uses the same, but fixes the stuff that svn had broken. And a familiar interface and workflow (bzr supports multiple workflows, a one that works like git too) is the whole world, when you need to bring a new person into the project.



Bzr being slow is a myth, that was true in the 1.x versions, since 2.x the speed is ok. There's a really good article about bzr myths here: https://unspecified.wordpress.com/20...better-than-x/ - it turns out really good when you do some proper benchmarks.

I deal with Git at work so I got some experience with it too (I actually admin our git repos server too), and the amount of problems that devs have (not to mention the testers) who used svn all their lives is sometimes overwhelming. It looks to me that people don't really care about Git, they care about Github, they only want a fancy website to manage code branches and pull requests. I see Github at the core of this problem - it got way popular without most people understanding what it is. Every week I see some new github "projects" with a single commit, used plainly as file storage.

On the other hand - why can't we have 3 popular dvcses? People always insist on limiting their choice, 1 of something "has to" be the most popular, be perceived as "the best" and all alternatives (despite being good enough too) get shoved aside.

I have nothing against alternatives, thatfor I asked if hg would not be a good idea and who uses it. The "people have learned to use svn, they are to lazy to learn new stuff, so lets use it or somethinng very similar forever" argument is no good one for me, for nothing, its a lets save now 20 minutes but waste every day in your live the 1minute. I choose the 20 minute waste as far as I can cope with it and not to much else changes at the moment every day. For me at the moment dvorak is a think I do postpone a bit, but its way more work or time to learn it than using git, and I have several dependencies that rely on knowing how to type, like just bought a old desire z on ebay, have to look if I like the hardware keyboard more than the touchkeyboards on android. etc....

And of course I have no problem with bzr beeing there, but I would not recommend it to somebody and not use it, its slower than hg and git, is it 100 times slower maybe not, yes, but still slower. and that matters. its more or less a filesystem, so people install other filesystem because of speed. good I give you that other features can be more important liek features of btrfs but it has some big restrictions and again its speed wise, its as far as I know still today not very usable with virtual machine files, that is a big disadvantage and therefor I will not use it anymore on new installations and go back to lvm.

To make it short, emacs has many developers there you cant use a very unpopular VCS except its 99% the same commands and features. I think most git developers could also deal well with hg. but it doesnt matter that much, and who wants to use a dead fish no commits = more or less dead. let this happen for a few years then it will be dropped from all distries (except maybe ubuntu).

[Cyber Killer]

(...) its slower than hg and git, is it 100 times slower maybe not, yes, but still slower. and that matters. (...)

No, it does not matter. 7 seconds for a new branch that's 50 MB in size and has hundreds of revisions (a large branch by any measurement), 7 (seven) seconds! It most probably took you longer to just read this post or open this webpage in your browser. Any automated test suite or compiler takes orders of magnitude more time to run. It's most probably even less if you have an ssd, but this is below a meaningful amount of time as it is. Bzr is fast enough for anything, so please stop repeating this myth.

The only real problem with bzr is that it's not popular, everything else start from that. But it's not bzr's fault, it's that git was written by Linus, and nearly nothing can compare to the amount of publicity that this makes. Maybe if RMS had written his own vcs that would be able to compete in popularity with git.