[Gnu-arch-users] Re: hmm. an alternative to a new maintainer. Hire your manager.

[Matthieu Moy]

Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> the FOSS-community's distributed revision control efforts are, at
> the moment, very much a mess. Cool! In that circumstance, there's a
> clear objective: build the Right Thing that Just Works.

I have the same observation, but not the same conclusion.

The clear objective is for me:

1) Look at the existing to see if you can find a project that is a
   candidate to be "the Right Thing that Just Works" or to become so.

2) If, and only if, you are 100% sure that no project can become
   something what you're looking for even if you help, then think
   about creating something new.

Otherwise, you're going to do something like: "There are too many
distributed RCS projects. I'm going to solve that: let's create one
more".

If you start redeveloping something now, then you have to realize that
you'll have to re-create a community. A community means developers,
co-operative users (people sending bug reports and feature requests
for example), and simply users.

Other RCS already have this community. GNU Arch had one, but for
various reasons, all the developers went away, and the users are
migrating, or have migrated. When you started GNU Arch, it was AFAIK
the only candidate for a distributed RCS, so creating a community was
relatively easy. Today, people willing to contribute to a distributed
RCS are already contributors of, say, mercurial, bzr, git, monotone or
whatever. You'll have to convince them to swith from their project to
yours, which IMHO, you'll never manage to do.

-- 
Matthieu