[Mailman-Developers] Should we move to Bazaar?

[John Dennis]

On Thu, 2007-05-03 at 22:01 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

[ superb summary, snipped for brevity ]

Thank you Stephen for your excellent summary, it was very informative
and even handed. I tend to share your view that git and mercurial are
the current best of breed.

At the moment the open source world is boiling with SCM innovation after
nearly 20 years of stability anchored by CVS. This is good.

What is not good for developers is the current fracturing. Projects have
selected different SCM's requiring developers to become familiar with
each of them. If one wants to be productive for better or worse there is
a significant learning curve. I'm already seeing issues where
cooperating organizations can no longer work together because they no
longer can manipulate their partner's SCM, or worse have invested
heavily in tools which only work with a particular SCM (e.g. CVS).
Eventually this will sort itself out as one or two SCM's generate enough
gravity to cause convergence. But in the meantime this fracturing is
producing barriers to productivity.

If in the decision making process this concern could be taken into
account I think it would be beneficial. By restricting the options to
the SCM's which currently have the most mindshare the pain threshold for
developers would be mitigated and the project would have stronger
assurances of on-going future support for the SCM.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>