The Most Emacs Bzr Saga
32 points by confusedalex
32 points by confusedalex
I think working on a project led by rms would drive me absolutely insane.
Oh, what a history. Many years ago, I was watching a presentation by Mark Shuttleworth from some university about the original Bazaar (or maybe it was about Arch) and I was super intrigued by idea of a distributed VCS. Then they came up with the bzr rewrite and I was hooked. I found it so much more sensible than git. I dedicated a few years to the project, was active on the mailing list, built some plugins, even did my part trying to make it faster by rewriting the code diffing algo in c. Eventually it became clear that Git is the winner, but it took me a long time to accept it.
This is awesome! I've always wanted to watch the drama play out in these mailing lists, but never had the guts to dive in. I love this telling of the story and the excerpts!
I'm not 100% up to speed on what makes a project an official GNU project. Is it the license? (Git and Linux are both GPLv2-only, whereas Bazaar is GPLv2+.) Copyright assignment? Hosting of repos/issue trackers/mailing lists/etc? A name with the prefix "GNU" that acts like an endorsement? Evidently there's an important distinction somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is or why it matters.
Also, repeated off-by-one error:
On November 13th, ESR posted a seven-word message:
Commits are open. Have at it.
[...]
Six years of debate, [...] and it ended with seven words.
Agh, such a missed opportunity for symmetry!
It is software specifically under the GNU umbrella, they have a list here: https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs
This summary says that Richard Stallman forbade the Emacs project from migrating to Git as late as 2013. It says that later in 2013 and in late 2014, Emacs migrated to Git in two stages. But it doesn’t mention Stallman after early 2013.
Did Stallman really not post any objections on those later mailing list threads, after years of advocating for Bazaar? Or did he lose authority over the Emacs project in that time?
I don’t see emails with his name on the article’s linked threads from 2014, but I’m sure there were other threads not linked. I did wonder if that was the period when Stallman resigned from something due to controversy, but no, I was remembering something different: Wikipedia says Stallman left the Free Software Foundation (not the GNU Project) in 2019 (not 2013).