[Gnu-arch-users] Future of GNU Arch, bazaar and bazaar-ng ... ?

[jblack at inframix.com]

> 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.

Unless there's somebody taking over Arch development, the way to go is
Bazaar. There are two lines of development for Bazaar, 1.x and 2.x
(typically, when you hear people say "baz" they're referring to bazaar 1.x
and when they say "bzr" they're referring to Bazaar 2.x, more confusingly,
Bazaar 2.x has been called other things including bazaar-ng and bazing).
1.x is the Bazaar that you've been working on. The 2.x one is the one that
Martin Pool has been working on. 

The company sponsoring Bazaar, Canonical, has promised that there will be
a migration path all the way up to Bazaar 2.x. If you're coming from
Bazaar 1.5.x, the process should be a pretty easy one way process. Bazaar
1.5.x is going to have a variety of significant changes to it, though
there will be a upgrade path from 1.4.x to 1.5.x. To get from old tla
archives, one could migrate from 1.4.x or 1.5.x (Which one will be
necessary is an open question)


> 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, ...).

Bazaar 2.x is still in flux. The format should settle down by the end of
October (and be a full 2.0 release around the end of December) You could
start writing against it now if you were careful about the design
decisions you make, especially if you apply design patterns. 

If you go for more direct approaches, I'd hold off on Bazaar 2.x frontends
until October and focus on your Bazaar 1.x frontends in the meantime.

> 
> 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".)

Bazaar 2.x is working on that as we speak. :)

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

We've been keeping most of the Bazaar stuff on the Bazaar wiki at
http://bazaar.canonical.com. I'll make some time to review the bazaar
stuff at the old gnuarch wiki and get whats there either up to date or
pointed appropriately.

-- 
 James Blackwell      |   Life is made of the stuff that hasn't killed
 Tell someone a joke! |   you yet.                       - yours truly
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