5 ms·

He's not really actively involved, though. He's just been on a crusade lately to eradicate unwanted VCSs still used in older projects, including CVS for NetBSD

by abusque 12y ago

He's not really actively involved, though. He's just been on a crusade lately to eradicate unwanted VCSs still used in older projects, including CVS for NetBSD and bzr for emacs. Honestly I'm glad he's doing it, I'm hoping it might make it more likely for newcomers to contribute to these projects. He has posted quite a few articles about these conversions on his blog [0], if you want to read about it. [0] http://esr.ibiblio.org/ http://esr.ibiblio.org/

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Wonder if he's tried to evangelize on the OpenBSD mailing lists yet? The smackdown from Theo would be amusing. To some extent, it's good he's doing this. To another, very few VCSs other than SCSS can really be called "obsolete", just primitive. Most of the time, people who go on about VCS migrations seem to be just bikeshedding and can't seem to give out specific justifications other than listing features that the upstream project likely doesn't need. It's not trivial either, changing a VCS often means changing the entire way a project is structured, for often uncertain gains.
- syntheticnature 12y ago
  Well, I can pick on OpenBSD's favorite: CVS repository corruption does happen, but CVS has no active integrity checking. You'll only detect it if you go far enough back... or run a conversion program. If you're lucky, you discover while it's covered by backups, but these issues can sleep for years. This caused a migration I was involved with to just become a scrape, as the code at the tip was fine. (I'd also say that atomic commits are an excellent reason to leave CVS behind, but that can be argued.)
  - x0x0 12y ago
    been there, done that, shit seriously sucked you should never use a vcs that has no ability to ask "is this repo in a valid state", or you may try to checkout the point version released to a large customer and be unable to do so. Data corruption can happen, even on raid drives (we're pretty sure it was a bug in the controller, but that doesn't change the effect.)
- jessaustin 12y ago
  He has written a bunch of nontrivial code, and is running that code himself on his own machines (and those donated specifically for this purpose). He leaves it to the community to decide whether they want the products of that work. This seems the antithesis of bikeshedding.
- rdc12 12y ago
  Not waiting for your current VCS to bitrot is probably a good idea (assuming bzr dying isn't massive hyperbole)
  - bronson 12y ago
    It's not hyperbole, development has pretty much ground to a halt: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev/changes http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev/changes
codemac 12y ago
esr knows how much of the open source community's success is driven from social factors as opposed to technical factors. I'm excited with his progress as well.
Scuds 12y ago
First I've ever heard of Bazaar (bzr). Sponsored by Canonical. It's a smidge ironic that ESR himself is migrating a project away from it. :)
- nosefrog 12y ago
  I don't see the irony. What am I missing?
  - mitchty 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
    - dkuntz2 12y ago
      But he had nothing to do with the development of bzr...
      - rdc12 12y ago
        It is more in the lineage of puns and odd coincidences (not quite right, but something better is escaping me)
        dragonwriter 12y ago
        Its not really completely a coincidence, since The Cathedral and the Bazaar is almost certainly the source of the name of the VCS.
        rdc12 12y ago
        And ESR being the guy attempting to move projects away from Bazaar is unrelated to that
- cschmidt 12y ago
  There were three distributed VCS that were in the running for a while. There was git, bazaar (bzr), and mercurial (hg). For a while people were using on all 3, but eventually git won out.

by abusque 12y ago

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

Wonder if he's tried to evangelize on the OpenBSD mailing lists yet? The smackdown from Theo would be amusing. To some extent, it's good he's doing this. To another, very few VCSs other than SCSS can really be called "obsolete", just primitive. Most of the time, people who go on about VCS migrations seem to be just bikeshedding and can't seem to give out specific justifications other than listing features that the upstream project likely doesn't need. It's not trivial either, changing a VCS often means changing the entire way a project is structured, for often uncertain gains.

syntheticnature 12y ago
Well, I can pick on OpenBSD's favorite: CVS repository corruption does happen, but CVS has no active integrity checking. You'll only detect it if you go far enough back... or run a conversion program. If you're lucky, you discover while it's covered by backups, but these issues can sleep for years. This caused a migration I was involved with to just become a scrape, as the code at the tip was fine. (I'd also say that atomic commits are an excellent reason to leave CVS behind, but that can be argued.)
- x0x0 12y ago
  been there, done that, shit seriously sucked you should never use a vcs that has no ability to ask "is this repo in a valid state", or you may try to checkout the point version released to a large customer and be unable to do so. Data corruption can happen, even on raid drives (we're pretty sure it was a bug in the controller, but that doesn't change the effect.)
jessaustin 12y ago
He has written a bunch of nontrivial code, and is running that code himself on his own machines (and those donated specifically for this purpose). He leaves it to the community to decide whether they want the products of that work. This seems the antithesis of bikeshedding.
rdc12 12y ago
Not waiting for your current VCS to bitrot is probably a good idea (assuming bzr dying isn't massive hyperbole)
- bronson 12y ago
  It's not hyperbole, development has pretty much ground to a halt: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev/changes http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev/changes

codemac 12y ago

esr knows how much of the open source community's success is driven from social factors as opposed to technical factors. I'm excited with his progress as well.

Scuds 12y ago

First I've ever heard of Bazaar (bzr). Sponsored by Canonical. It's a smidge ironic that ESR himself is migrating a project away from it. :)

nosefrog 12y ago
I don't see the irony. What am I missing?
- mitchty 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
  - dkuntz2 12y ago
    But he had nothing to do with the development of bzr...
    - rdc12 12y ago
      It is more in the lineage of puns and odd coincidences (not quite right, but something better is escaping me)
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        Its not really completely a coincidence, since The Cathedral and the Bazaar is almost certainly the source of the name of the VCS.
        rdc12 12y ago
        And ESR being the guy attempting to move projects away from Bazaar is unrelated to that
cschmidt 12y ago
There were three distributed VCS that were in the running for a while. There was git, bazaar (bzr), and mercurial (hg). For a while people were using on all 3, but eventually git won out.