Re: PROPOSAL: Move to git, now that bzr is no longer a req.

[David Kastrup]

Thierry Volpiatto <address@hidden> writes:

> Bastien <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Our ChangeLog files are very useful in debugging.
>>> They complement the diffs between versions of the source files.
>>
>> I think everyone agrees with this.
>
> No, I still think changelog files are unuseful when using a decent dVCS.
> With git you have "git-log --grep" and "git-grep" and even
> "git-log -p --grep", and "git-log" is also just _working_.

I actually use git repositories for working with Subversion based
projects, and obviously also for working with Bazaar based projects.
The first thing I do is checking out a Git mirror or running the (often
expensive) import from Subversion.

And the most important reason for that is not the workflow for
_creating_ new patches (though being able to privately rebase is good),
but for navigating the history of a project and searching its
information.

This is so much more workable than using the _native_ tools of the
respective repositories that it isn't funny.

Now the one thing that will _always_ cause trouble when creating/vetting
a contribution for Emacs is the ChangeLog.  Since Emacs is a reasonably
fast-moving project and the ChangeLog is a central contention point like
the Windows registry, you will _always_ get ChangeLog merge conflicts
when committing.

Now as long as the "native" repository of Emacs is Bazaar with its
absurdly slow log generation, discussing the usefulness or uselessness
of ChangeLog for daily work independently from Git migration seems
pointless: the pros and cons cannot really be estimated by people not
yet using Git.

I'm quite convinced that nobody will miss ChangeLog files when working
with Git.  It's not even a tradeoff.  In my book, that's one of the most
important advantages of Git, but of course it is a hen-and-egg problem
to convince people of that when their current experience tells them a
ChangeLog file can be useful in the course of daily work.

-- 
David Kastrup