Re: Ready to start serious work on VC mode again

[Jason Earl]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:

> Jason Earl <address@hidden>:
>> "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > Cleaning up Battle For Wesnoth for the big stable 1.4 release, and
>> > dealing with the aftermath, took longer and ate more of my bandswidth
>> > than expected.  But I'm ready to restart serious work on VC now.
>> 
>> I've been meaning to take another look at that game...
>
> Yeah, it's why I disappeared for four months.  But the good news is
> that it's our best release ever, not just for features but for low bug
> load and stability too (we sweated blood to do it, but we reduced the bug
> count by a factor of 5).  And it has an entire new campaign in it that
> I wrote: The Hammer of Thursagan.

I really do deserve a break...

>> An initial migration of the CVS repository using cvsps has been done.
>> You can find the results at:
>> 
>> http://bzr.notengoamigos.org
>
> Are changes made to this repo being propagated into CVS?

No, changes made in CVS are being propagated to this bzr repo on an
hourly basis, but it is not bi-directional.

Stefan just sent me an email that reminded me that I also should point
out that this particular repository is more of a proof of concept than a
finished product.  It's fine for testing bzr, but it is missing
important merge data that would be necessary for a proper conversion.
There are also problems with some of the tags.

I am currently working on another conversion from Andreas Schwab's git
repository at:

git://repo.or.cz/emacs.git

Apparently this git repository has a bunch of merge data that was
basically added by hand.

I will probably also see if a conversion via cvs2svn gives a better
result, mostly because I like watching top go on the server I am using
to do conversions.

>> I would also suggest that you get an up to date version of bzr.  The
>> Bazaar hackers have released a major update about once a month for
>> some time now with all of these updates making fairly major
>> improvements.  It is entirely possible that the bzr client that ships
>> with whatever distribution your using is old enough that it won't
>> even read the format that the test repository is in.
>
> I have 1.3.1, that's what Hardy Heron ships.  Is that new enough?

I am pretty sure that would still be missing a big improvement to bzr
diff -r ancestor that Stefan reported made a huge difference in his
ability to use bzr for Emacs development.  It's certainly better than
the completely unusable 0.11 version that is in Debian stable.

1.3.1 will certainly work.  Just don't come back and tell the list bzr
is ridiculously slow at some history-based commands.  We know that
already :).  Newer versions are significantly better, but there still is
some work to be done.

>> The current stable version is 1.3.1, but 1.4 is going to be released
>> imminently, and I believe that it will contain several fixes prompted
>> by the Emacs test of bzr.  If you are serious about playing with
>> Emacs and bzr you probably should just check out bzr.dev and use that
>> :).
>
> How soon is "imminent"?  If it's like, within two weeks I'll just
> wait.

I actually was surprised when I went to http://bazaar-vcs.org/ and 1.4
wasn't released.  I don't read the bzr mailing list in its entirety, but
I really thought that it had already been released.  bzr.dev currently
says that it is 1.5+.

Honestly, 1.3.1 is probably more than good enough if you are just going
to be poking around.  Especially considering that the repo in question
is little more than a proof of concept.

Jason