Manual policy (Re: Emacs-devel Digest, Vol 44, Issue 65)

[Eric S. Raymond]

From: Jason Rumney <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Policy issue in the VC manual -- recommending CVS?!?
> To: "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > Recommending GNU arch is dubious considering Arch's poorly-maintained
> > and poorly-documented state.  If I'm not mistaken, Arch has been
> > effectively moribund since about 2003.
> >   
> 
> I think you're mistaken. Savannah lists the last release as July last year.

So it's only been over a year since the last point release.  I'm not 
hugely reassured.
 
> > Recommending CVS is well beyond dubious into outright ridiculous.
> 
> Like it or not, CVS is stable, and widely used. Its "problems" are
> widely exaggerated by adherents to the latest wave of version control
> religions.

Er.  I've been using VCSes since the days when SCCS was the only one
in existence.  The fact that I still cheerfully use RCS, the second
one ever built, makes me pretty bulletproof against charges of
version-control faddism.  But file-oriented VCSes just plain suck
for distributed projects, and there's no way to make them not suck.

> > No recommendations at all would be better than these.  Who decides
> > what the manual recommends?  If it's "the last person to care", I'm
> > going to nuke these in a nanosecond.
> Arch is part of GNU

Please tell me you're not implying that we should recommend an inferior
GPLed tool over a superior one just because the inferior is distributed
from an FSF server.  That would be taking political jaundice to an
absurd extreme.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>