Future of GNU Arch, bazaar and bazaar-ng ... ?

Matthieu Moy Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr
Sat Aug 20 22:01:55 BST 2005


[ Adding one question here: Is the list gnu-arch-dev dead? It's the
  second time I recieve a permanent error error while trying to post
  to it. I'm keeping bazaar-ng and bazaar in Cc: Please, reply to
  this message if you wish to crosspost to the 3 lists. ]

Hi all,

Recently, Tom announced he was stopping the mainainance of GNU
Arch[1]. I didn't see an "official announcement", but as I understand
it, Canonical decided to move the effort from Bazaar to Bazaar-NG[2].
The wiki[3] now presents baz as "Bazaar 1" and bzr, AKA Bazaar-NG, as
"Bazaar 2".

This raises a few questions to me:

What's the future of tla 1.x? Same for 2.0. Given that the main
contributors of GNU Arch--except Tom--are mostly people working now on
Bazaar-NG, I _guess_ Bazaar is the way of the future.

What's the future of Bazaar (baz)? There was a roadmap here[4] that I
suppose is mostly outdated. In particular, I'd like to know if the
following plans have a chance to be implemented:

1) The namespace change (making a/c--b--v optional). If this makes its
   way into bazaar, I guess this will have an influence on front-ends
   in particular. Actually, I think this idea should be dropped given
   the new Bazaar<->Bazaar-NG situation.

2) The cached-inventory system. Since, as I understand it, Robert
   started working on this, and it could really improve the
   performance, that may be a good thing to get it in Bazaar.


Is there an approximate roadmap for Bazaar 2? Currently, Bazaar-NG is
evolving quickly, with no guarantee of backward compatibility, which
is good for a prototype, but will off course have to change. I think
it would be nice to have a list (initially empty) of "frozen" things,
on which the majority agrees and that are very unlikely to change
before the 1.0. I'm particularly concerned about this as one of the
authors of Xtla: I want to know when people can reasonably start
working on front-ends and related tools. Bazaar-NG seems to be
becoming a very good tool by itself, but for wide adoption, it will
need all the related tools one can expect for a revision control
system (good web interface, good integration in various IDE and
editors, GUI, ...).

The dual for this would be a list of things that _will_ change in the
future. For example, the current storage is space-inefficient, but
this is going to change soon. This can be important for people
evaluating Bazaar-NG today (I've recently seen a comment from a user
saying roughly "I tried several RCS. I didn't like bazaar-NG because
of it's storage-inefficient archive format, so I've chosen Mercury
instead".)

Thanks for your clarification (In particular, Robert, could you update
the Bazaar pages on http://wiki.gnuarch.org/ ?).


 [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2005-08/msg00030.html
 [2] http://bazaar.canonical.com/BzrFAQ#head-3d5a7fba6dfa6c00e192b71597db5c42b4251ef5
 [3] http://bazaar.canonical.com/
 [4] http://wiki.gnuarch.org/BazaarRoadmap

-- 
Matthieu





More information about the bazaar mailing list