mercurial / bazaar meeting, and other news

[Martin Pool]

We had a very interesting and productive meeting in London earlier this
month with four people from the mercurial team and four from the
bazaar team.  We spent most of the time on discussions of particular
design aspects comparing the different decisions we'd made.
Robert Collins wrote a bzr plugin that gives access to hg repositories
including viewing them with 'bzr visualize'.

The challenge for Bazaar now is to improve our performance.
Mercurial have focussed
on speed from the word go and benefitted from it -- for example, in
considering physical disk head movement on trees too large to fit in
memory.

Bazaar has tried to follow "make it work, make it right, make it fast",
and now is the time to make it fast.  The goal to bear in mind is that
it must be pleasantly fast to use for representative operations on
representative trees.  I'm very happy with how this is coming along and
the way our team has focussed on speeding things up and simplifying as
we go.

The meeting helped me reach a decision that we should do a smart server.
Working over dumb transports is very very useful and we will continue to
improve it -- but it's never going to be as fast as a protocol that can
run application code on the far side.  So, a smart server it is, and
Andrew and I have started work on it.

There are other things that need to keep rolling along: better UI
polish, better documentation & cleaning up the web site.  We need to
make sure patches aren't dropped, and to try to keep up a rhythm of
steadily improving releases.

(And, changing hats)  In Ubuntu, Canonical is trying to make open source
more widely used, fix bug #1, make open source development more
efficient and get more people involved.  Canonical remains convinced
that Bazaar is the best way to get to all of those goals, and we'll keep
investing in it.  Apparently there has been some very interesting
discussion of Bazaar at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Paris, and we
should have a report on that soon.

  http://launchpad.net/bugs/1

I'm very happy to announce that John Arbash Meinel will be joining us at
Canonical to work on Bazaar.  I admire the work John's done here in the
past and can't wait to see what he'll do next.  We're still looking out
for a good community advocate or evangelist, and are watching out for
another good engineer.  (If you've sent an application be assured that I
am working through them.)

  http://www.ubuntu.com/employment

-- 
Martin