xemacs vs emacs

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Robert Widhopf-Fenk writes:

 > So you say, they did no testing and just decided to use bzr,
 > too bad I like those threads where projects were discussing
 > and testing which DVS to use after cvs/svn.

There was a long set of such threads on emacs-devel.  It's pretty
clear that most of the Emacs developers who have a strong preference
want git, with a few hg supporters and a few svn supporters.  However,
these arguments were brushed aside on the grounds that GNU projects
should support each other, and of the three GNU VCSes, CVS is what
*everybody* wants to get away from, GNU Arch is in a development coma,
and GNU Bazaar is really active.  The choice is obvious.

There have been a number of such threads on xemacs-beta as well.
Nobody has really contested that git and hg are good enough, and svn
has had support in the past but it's waning.  Darcs was a dark horse,
but I would veto it on performance and reliability grounds.  Monotone,
Codeville, GNU Arch, and many others have never really gained any
traction.  In a way it's a shame about GNU Arch as that would make it
much easier to share with SXEmacs.

 > Have performance issues with bzr been the reason why the
 > XEmacs developers have chosen hg?

No.  bzr was never seriously considered.  bzr was recommended to me
personally by a Canonical employee, but that was after we were already
well down the path to hg or git.

BTW, I've had conversations with the Bazaar developers.  I'm confident
that bazaar will see a lot of improvement in the next few months.  I'm
dubious whether it can scale to a project like the Linux kernel, but
I'm sure it will be usable for Emacsen.

 > Didier said it was only discussed on the internal mailing list.

No.  There was little real discussion; if there really had been an
advocate for something other than hg it would have been forced out to
xemacs-beta.  But in practice we started with the consensus that CVS
had to go and that Subversion was not appropriate.  Everybody was at
least +0.5 on either git or hg -- as long as somebody else did the
work.:-)

hg was chosen because Mike stepped up to do the work, and even found
us a host.  He who does the work makes the decisions.