Re: support for bzr shelve/unshelve in vc-dir

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Glenn Morris writes:

 > I couldn't immediately see anything that would alleviate your worries.
 > But, I'm not sure exactly what your worries are.

Simply that a patch will never be applied to the canonical Bazaar,
thus making better support for shelve in vc.el dependent on the user
having a patched bzr.

The Bazaar project has an extremely strict and centralized (!)
process, compared to which Emacs might well be considered an anarchy:
2 committers are required to approve each patch, and even the
assignment policy is stricter (all contributions to the core, no
matter how small, must be assigned -- third party plugins may remain
the property of the developer, though).

Until about three weeks ago, patches that didn't fit any of the
committers' agendas tended to languish in the queue.  They've long
recognized that this is a problem, and after dithering for a bit have
established a "patch pilot" program which is intended to guide 3rd
party patches through the process.  So far (less than a month of
experience, but it's indicative) it's been very successful in getting
doc and minor improvements through.  However, changes in UI still tend
to get stuck (for everybody, including the core committers) in
bikeshedding.

 > While reading the conditions on that page, a first glance at the bzr
 > 2.0.2 source shows: it is distributed under GPLv2+ rather than v3+,
 > http://www.gnu.org/software/bzr does not exist, it does not have
 > texinfo documentation, it contains numerous references to the "Linux"
 > operating system, and there doesn't seem to be any reference in the
 > --version output or man-page to it being a GNU project.

Nope, and Canonical management is pushing in the direction of
emphasizing that it's a *Canonical product*: eg, all of the URLs are
moving from "bazaar-vcs.org" to "bazaar.canonical.com".  They got some
pushback from the peanut gallery, but no committers seem to have a
problem with that.