[darcs-users] [patch111] Contribute vc-darcs.el for Emacs VC support.

Trent W. Buck twb at cybersource.com.au
Fri Dec 11 02:44:29 UTC 2009


<dons Grumpy Old Man hat>

Dave Love <bugs at darcs.net> writes:

> Wed Dec  9 23:22:06 GMT 2009  Dave Love <fx at gnu.org>
>   * Contribute vc-darcs.el for Emacs VC support.

As Jason noted, this would be appropriate for contrib/.

>   The Emacs maintainers rejected the Darcs support (despite supporting
>   the other major free VCSs) :-(.

I guess you mean that the GNU Emacs maintainers are unwilling to include
vc-darcs.el in their distro.  Please provide a link to the thread (on
emacs-devel, presumably) where this decision was reached.

>   Distributing it with Darcs makes it reasonable to drop support for
>   old Darcs versions

Not necessarily.  Consider the following case:

    aptitude install darcs
    emacs -Q /ssh:fs:my-repo/foo.c

This will run darcs(1) on the host "fs", not localhost.  And in my
real-world example,

    $ darcs --version; ssh fs darcs --version
    2.3.0 (release)
    2.0.2 (release)

>   Please take care only to include changes covered by an appropriate FSF
>   assignment/disclaimer, though, in case it ever can get into Emacs.

[Lurkers: GNU Emacs will only distribute code to which FSF holds
copyright.  This is done by getting ALL contributors to snail-mail them
a signed legal-type document.]

That will be difficult to enforce, because the review team don't know
who has (or is willing to) assign copy rights to the FSF.  We could work
around that by simply putting you, Dave, in charge of reviewing all
patches to vc-darcs.el.

Furthermore, do we need to care?  How likely is it that the GNU Emacs
maintainers will reverse their decision and ship vc-darcs.el?

                                 * * *

The bundle you submitted contains a single patch.  Surely vc-darcs.el
has history?  Instead of discarding that history, can it be imported
into the Darcs repo (followed by a simple "darcs mv *.el contrib/")?

As you note in your source comments, there is a competing implementation
by Juliusz.  Why are there two versions?  Is it solely because Juliusz
(presumably) won't assign copy rights to the FSF?  If we agree not to
care about copyright assignment, are you and Juliusz prepared to work
together on a unified vc-darcs.el?

Does Juliusz' vc-darcs.el includes features that yours doesn't?  If so,
and we can't use Juliusz' work (due to copyright), are you prepared to
reimplement those features in a novel way (i.e. without copying)?

Does your (Dave's) vc-darcs.el include features that Juliusz' doesn't?
If not, why should we include your vc-darcs.el instead of Juliusz'?
After all, Darcs doesn't require copyright assignment.



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