Eric S. Raymond, the co-founder of Open Source Initiative, has recommended that Emacs should move to another version control system like GitHub git as bzr is dying.
In a mailer, Raymond highlighted the key reasons why he believes that Emacs should move. Raymond said that bzr is moribund; its dev list has flatlined; and most of Canonical’s in-house projects have already abandoned bzr and moved to GitHub git.
Open Source Initiative co-founder believes that bzr’s codebase is sufficiently mature to be used as a production tool, but he does mention that continuing to use the revision control system will have “social and signaling effects damaging to Emacs’s prospects.”
“Sticking to a moribund version-control system will compound and exacerbate the project’s difficulty in attracting new talent,” Raymond claimed.
The open source software advocate went onto say that Emacs is being looked upon by many as “difficult, bulky, armor-plated, and generally stuck in the last century” and if that image was to be fought off, Emacs can’t continue to use a system that would “further cast the project as crusty, insular, and backward-looking.”
Read more on the mailer here.
[Update: The mailer talks about Git and not GitHub. The article has been updated to reflect the same. We apologize to our readers for the goof up]
His post says “Git” not “Github”. The two are not the same…
Kudos on transparency by striking out GitHub instead of deleting it.