
Welcome, New Emacs Developers - deng
http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2014/11/13/welcome-new-emacs-developers/
======
naner
This sort of thing is very important. One of the (many) issues that hinders
open source projects is that it is difficult to jump into the code, even for
experienced developers. Every project can benefit by making contributing easy
and building as quick and painless as possible.

I still remember a couple years ago I wanted to contribute to Chromium. I took
one look at the build instructions and decided I didn't want to contribute
that badly...

------
brianpgordon
> Emacs switched the version control system from Bazaar to git yesterday

If you haven't followed the drama, here's ESR's take:

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2014-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2014-01/msg00005.html)

~~~
nekopa
Jesus Christ, (and I say that as a Buddhist) thanks for that rabbit hole.
Thanks. I have spent 45 minutes so far on it, and it just keeps getting
deeper. If I had enough karma I would downvote you for effectivly killing my
evening, but as I don't I upvoted you instead in the hope that you will read
my message and think twice in the future about posting such a fascinating,
interesting time sink that will kill people's productivity. Cheers

~~~
mistermumble
ESR's post provides a link to a long but worthwhile article by Jelmer Vernooij
on the history of Bazaar and why it lost to Git.

The key paragraph:

We lost sight of what mattered for our users, focusing on features that were
nice but perhaps not as necessary as we thought. We overengineered. We didn't
get rid of the crufty unnecessary features. It's harder to comprehend,
contribute to or fix performance issues in a large layered codebase. And the
larger a codebase becomes, the larger the surface for bugs, the harder it is
to refactor.

[https://www.stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-
retrospectiv...](https://www.stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-
retrospective.html)

~~~
cbd1984
The link appears down (hostname doesn't resolve for me):

[http://web.archive.org/web/20141108100240/https://www.statio...](http://web.archive.org/web/20141108100240/https://www.stationary-
traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html)

    
    
        % host www.stationary-traveller.eu
    
        Host www.stationary-traveller.eu not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
    

(In case that helps someone.)

In fact, I think I have something, because dig www.stationary-traveller.eu
+trace seems to work: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12025173/dig-
returns-serv...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12025173/dig-returns-
servfail-but-trace-works)

My resolv.conf is just 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 so I'm pretty sure this is
affecting others. OpenDNS resolves it, though:

    
    
        % nslookup www.stationary-traveller.eu 208.67.222.222
        Server:         208.67.222.222
        Address:        208.67.222.222#53
    
        Non-authoritative answer:
        www.stationary-traveller.eu     canonical name = aurelia.vernstok.nl.
        aurelia.vernstok.nl     canonical name = aurelia.jelmer.uk.
        Name:   aurelia.jelmer.uk
        Address: 178.63.244.14
    

This might provide a solution:
[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1278335](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1278335)

> EDIT,fixed: The CAUSE was that /etc/named.conf had no zone set for that
> domain. and also there was file for "DB record" missing in
> /var/named/domain.com.db file. This manual fixed it:
> [http://kb.iweb.com/entries/21155058-Adding-new-domains-to-
> DN...](http://kb.iweb.com/entries/21155058-Adding-new-domains-to-DNS-
> servers-from-the-shell)

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
This will be an interesting test to see if the claim 'emacs development was
held back because of it's VCS' actually holds.

~~~
aaronem
I doubt that was the only barrier.

~~~
broodbucket
It's not the only barrier but it is a barrier. I never would've considered
contributing to Emacs but now I might if I have free time.

------
cwyers
"Emacs: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread If It Wasn’t For The Fact That Emacs
Was Actually Invented Before Sliced Bread."

That's gold.

~~~
SeoxyS
Well, it would be, if it were true. I'm pretty sure Emacs was invented after
1928. Half a century later, actually. I found that claim really odd. Maybe
there's a joke or reference in there I'm not getting?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliced_bread](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliced_bread)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs)

~~~
fafner
It's simply a joke about Emacs having a long history. Don't take it too
seriously. Just like the "greatest thing since sliced bread" phrase. I mean
sliced bread is not great at all.

~~~
vkjv
You've clearly not had to make a sandwich with bread that isn't sliced. Sliced
bread is amazing.

~~~
ripter
homemade bread that you tear into pieces with your hands, is clearly the best.
Only lazy people have buy pre-sliced bread.

Feature Request: M-x slice-bread

~~~
Filligree
Have you guys ever heard of _knives_?

~~~
oblio
It's not the same thing, really. Freshly baked bread is awesome. Eating
freshly baked bread without slicing it = priceless.

------
to3m
I had a patch to emacs accepted about a year ago and I just used the previous
git mirror for everything.

esr's apparent attempts to get everybody to move to git are a little quixotic,
I have to say - but if it happens, it's probably a good thing. Where a DVCS is
a good fit, then you might as well use git. But even while I support this move
and assume workflow will be improved for emacs regulars, I wonder whether it
will prove so valuable for occasional contributors. (N.B., I'm English, so I
guess what I mean is: I don't believe that this will make much difference.)

I've now seen a couple of attempts to frame this change that way and I'm not
sure I buy it.

~~~
bad_user
If you read the email by ESR [1] explaining the rationale, I really think that
he is right. It's not that bzr isn't good enough to keep on going, it's about
the image exposed by Emacs as a project that still uses bzr.

And he does have a point. I for one do not look kindly on projects that still
use Google Code or SourceForge for hosting or other version control systems
other than Git or at least Mercurial. And this is because I look out for
projects that aren't well maintained - after all, the noise amongst open-
source stuff is incredible and I take notice of things such as when the last
release or last commit was, current issues, mailing list activity and yes, the
tools used.

That said, it's a pity that Emacs isn't being hosted on GitHub or BitBucket,
because if these services are good at something, that's quick browsing of
recent activity, plus they provide pull requests.

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2014-01/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2014-01/msg00005.html)

~~~
davexunit
GitHub and BitBucket are proprietary web applications. This makes them unfit
for hosting Emacs.

Also, the pull request system is not very good, IMO. It encourages bad
practices like having to use git push --force to submit a new patch set
without opening a brand new pull request (I suppose you could delete the
remote branch and recreate it each time). And then there's the merge commit
that it adds if you merge via Github, rather than rebasing to master and doing
a fast-forward for a clean history. As ugly as it is, I much prefer submitting
a patch set to a mailing list.

~~~
dima55
And on top of that, "github issues" are missing core functionality, such as
attaching files.

------
victorr
Does Vim have a source repository like this?

I could only find
[https://code.google.com/p/vim/](https://code.google.com/p/vim/) , but there
are only 3 contributors

~~~
thristian
That's the official Vim repository, yes. There are a lot of contributors to
Vim, but for consistency with the way Vim patches were handled before it had
an SCM, changes are sent as diffs to the mailing-list and manually committed
by Bram, rather than just being slurped into the repository with the original
author information intact.

