[Mailman-Developers] [Merge] lp:~wacky/postorius/csrf into lp:postorius

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Wackerbarth writes:

 > Having a main branch implies that the organization is imposing its
 > idea of "the right way".

In some sense true, but few organizations have either the resources or
inclination to maintain and support more than one "right way" at a
time.

 > History shows that parts which once were considered "the main
 > branch" often become byways as the momentum of the flow embraces
 > new ideas, directions or leadership.

Are you implying that bzr isn't capable of recognizing that a new
branch has become the mainline?  That's false, you know.  Any head in
your workspace can become mainline, and any commit can sprout a new
head.  (It's true that it requires substantial effort to change the
*public* mainline, but that's true of all DVCSes, including git: this
is a consequence of the same underlying issue that we know as "the
rebase problem".)

The rule in bazaar is actually the same as in git: the sequence of
leftmost ancestors of the current checked-out head appears as
mainline.  The difference is that by default "bzr log" will hide
non-leftmost ancestors of merge commits, thus emphasizing the
mainline, and this behavior is part of the specification of bzr.

This is very compatible with the project workflow Barry expressed a
preference for: the mainline appears as a sequence of merges of
feature branches.  However, bzr is perfectly compatible with much less
elegant workflows, such the use of bzr to emulate CVS. ;-)

In any case, Mailman is not going to change VCSes any time soon, and
if you prefer to use git or hg, bzr supports the fastimport format for
export and import.