This is misleading. He thinks emacs' interface that genericizes VC should have git commit and push be treated as combined and atomic, largely because he thought

This is misleading. He thinks emacs' interface that genericizes VC should have git commit and push be treated as combined and atomic, largely because he thought BZR worked that way by default (rather than actually being configured that way particularly for the emacs project). After much "wow, that would be awful" convincing by people who are more familiar with git and could articulate why one commits privately on purpose, RMS later changes his stance. What I saw him eventually say was that commit should remind the user that they may need to push to publish (and emacs should add a vc-push command), which is quite reasonable. To be fair, this is the issue with trying to put a generic interface over systems that don't -quite- work the same way. You tend to favor lowest common denominator. And sometimes there's not a "least surprise" workflow for everybody. The wind of the conversation now seems to blow towards one workflow for vcs and one slightly augmented one for dvcs, which seems correct.