Re: Apologia for bzr

[Eric S. Raymond]

Stephen J. Turnbull <address@hidden>:
>  >> Mostly there *aren't* any "standard modern terms",
> 
> You're getting too deep here.  I'm pretty sure what's under discussion
> is cut vs. kill, paste v. yank.

Well, at that level, yes.
 
> That's not what Eric's talking about.  The point he is making, it
> seems to me, is that Emacs is not an editor, it is a text editing
> environment or toolkit.  Similarly, git is not a VCS, it is an
> environment for developing a VCS.

That's exactly correct. Of the level git folks call "plumbing", anyway
- it's almost pure mechanism, no policy. What they call "porcelain" is
a layer on top of that which provides policy and UI.

The analogy between the C core and Emacs Lisp is not perfect, but
neither is it strained or silly. Emacs jargon is complex in the
same way git jargon is because both bottom layers provide a richness
and degree of orthogonality that mone of the competition quite matches.

An important difference is that git porcelain is rather a shambles
compared to Emacs Lisp - usable, but ugly and sharp-edged.  Eli's
complaints are not without justice.

Alas for git's competition, the power of the plumbing combined with
the social momentum of the project as a whole has more than
compensated for the porcelain's deficiencies.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>