Some questions about bazaar-ng

[John A Meinel]

Timo Haberkern wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> i'm searching for a new version control system for our small company.
> I saw bazaar-ng and it looks very promising. I have some questions
> about it:

I'll answer from what I know, being a helpful dev/user, but not the main
developer.
My short answer is that it is already usable, and will be generally
feature complete within 1-2months. But it is designed as an exploration
of revision control. So I think that while there will be an upgrade path
between releases, it would not be surprising if there were substantial
changes.

>
> 1.) Is there the possibility for an exclusiv checkout (like the
> subversion feature Optional locking ("reserved checkouts"))

In bzr, every "checkout" or working tree is a complete branch. They
really don't talk to eachother except when you want to merge/pull them
back together. It is a pretty different workflow from that offered by
SVN. Since you probably wouldn't keep the whole tree in a single
"repository". More likely, each project would be it's own tree.

>
> 2.) I saw that there is no GUI for bazaar-ng. If we start to use it, i
> would volunteer to do a java GUI for it. Has bazaar-ng a API that can
> be used from Java. Or do i need to use the command line tools from
> Java class?

bzr is the command line front-end, bzrlib is designed to be a python
library. I don't really know how well python and Java get along, though
I know there is Jython, which I think is python interpreted by the Java
interpreter, (it might be the other way around. I would guess that
either way you would be able to have a nice library, rather than
invoking a new process for everything you want to do.
I've been toying with creating a wxPython based GUI. Mostly I've been
trying to figure out what would be useful in a GUI, before creating
something that looks okay, but is technically not very useful.

>
> 3.) What do you think? When will bazaar-ng in a state in which we can
> use it for production? Is there any release plan?

If you are considering "production" meaning very stable, it is probably
a ways off. As is, some of the file formats are in flux. Trying to
determine what the 'best' format is. I think it is likely that we will
end up supporting a few serialization formats, which have different
trade-offs.
Not to scare you off, everything is step-wise updated, and I haven't
known a time where "bzr upgrade" didn't fix everything. (though upgrade
is a newer command :).

As far as usability, we still have to finalize how merging will be
represented in the tree. I submitted a patch which would handle the
multiple merge scenario.
We would need slightly better remote branch support. I think we would
want a way to push changes to a remote branch, which there are a couple
of plugins for, but no fine-grained built-in support.

Martin is the main developer, so he probably has a little bit better
"grand-plan" view.
bazaar-ng is designed to be more of an experimental project. Exploring
different ideas, and seeing what works well.
I think the core work is done, and if you started using it, I think we
could promise not to break stuff. :)
Except for digital signatures (which haven't been added yet either). The
design is such that everything can be signed, but if the file formats
change, you might have to re-sign. (sign again, not quit :).

My personal feeling from using bzr, is that within 2 months it will be
relatively feature complete. But that doesn't mean there won't still be
some experimentation going on.

One thing I really like about bzr is that it is well laid out allowing
you to experiment with different ideas for revctl. But unfortunately,
that doesn't mean it is the best one to base your company around.

John
=:->

>
> Timo


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