Some questions about bazaar-ng

[Martin Pool]

On  8 Jul 2005, John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Yes, decentralized systems tend to have a bias towards, well,
decentralization: letting everyone try their own thing, even if it 
can't eventually be merged.  

That said I think it would be possible to do reserved checkouts 
in bzr, perhaps through our new and very successful plugin interface.

> > 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.

I expect you would be able to run bzrlib under Jython and write a gui or
other extensions in Java.  I haven't tried running it on Jython yet.

> > 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.

As an example, some people are interested in having a SQL back end,
which might make sense in a corporate environment.

> 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 :).

We haven't ever lost history since I started self-hosting in March.  

I expect people will be able to use it in production in a couple of
months and we will have a 1.0 release around the end of 2005 or early
2006.  We'll have a specific release plan closer to that date.

The big features for the next few months are:

 - much faster network IO (and perhaps more compact storage)

 - built-in upload support

 - better merge support

 - digital signing

> bazaar-ng is designed to be more of an experimental project. Exploring
> different ideas, and seeing what works well.

See also this message from our sponsor (my boss):

  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.bazaar-ng.general/1127

If you're looking for a production-ready system right now, baz
(bazaar.canonical.com) may be a better bet.

-- 
Martin