[Gnu-arch-users] Re: to support the continued development of Arch

[Matthieu MOY]

Andy Tai said:
> Hi, there are many users of the GNU Arch SCM system,
> and some people have expressed concerned about its
> future.  Given that Tom Lord has declared he will not
> continue to work on tla (GNU Arch 1.0) and revc (GNU
> Arch 2.0), and Canonical is focusing on bazaar-ng, a
> Python-based SCM not directly compatible with Arch,

Not "directly compatible", but keep in mind that Canonical has thousands
of archives to migrate, so, be sure the migration will be made easy.

> but that the current C-based tla code base is a usable
> SCM for many applications and the experimental recv
> code base may hold a lot of promise for fixing the
> shortcomings of tla,

Not more, not less than bazaar-ng. revc is not compatible with tla either.
revc is also a rewrite from scratch. The main difference between bazaar-ng
and revc is that the team of revc is reduced to 0 person, and the set of
people who ever contributed is only 1 person. Bazaar-ng is actively
developped by around 5 developpers, and the number of people who ever
contributed is probably above 10 or 20.

> I propose that interested parties come up with some money to
> support the continued development of Arch.

I also think "GNU Arch" (understand tla + Bazaar) is not dead. It has a
lot of problems that bazaar-ng will solve, but sure, some people will
continue prefering baz for some reasons (I have one: I can use baz write
access behind the firewall + proxy at work. I can't (yet ?) with bzr). So,
I'd like Bazaar to be maintained for some time. There will be Canonical
sponsored maintainance for a few releases. I'm also willing to continue
fixing bugs in Bazaar, but I don't know the codebase well enough to fix
serious bugs.

Anyway, I'm quite happy with the current development version. I don't
think it represent a lot of work to support it, as long as you don't ask
for new features.

-- 
Matthieu