New PyBaz maintainer: Aaron Bentley

[David Allouche]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> David Allouche wrote:
>>> Aaron Bentley wrote:
>>>> Any chance you could push a [Pybaz] 1.5 release out?
>>>
>>> Really, I cannot be bothered to spend time on this code anymore.
>>>
>>> If you are willing, I would be glad to make the official maintainer.
> 
> Okay, I will take over as maintainer.  I'll push out 1.5, and I'll keep
> it working, and that's about it.

This quote from a recent email exchange with Aaaron says it all.

But since an official maintainership hand-over deserves a bit more
ceremony, here comes the obligatory historical retrospective on Pybaz.

In May 2003, I started using GNU Arch (then larch, the shell scripts
implementation) to help me manage my development work. Distributed
version control held many promises to help free software developers
collaborate more effectively. Suddenly, it was apparent how much version
control tools (or lack thereof) used to be bottlenecks of communication,
and new development processes were being devised and tested.

It was the best of time, it was the worst of times. Linus Torvalds was
being very happy with Bitkeeper, but massive ill-will was building
against Larry McVoy. Subversion was still < 1.0, Monotone and Darcs were
upstart challengers to the relatively well established GNU Arch.
Everything seemed possible.

Around November 2003, energy was building up to implement various
command-line and GUI wrappers around tla (the translated-to-C
implementation). Some significant work was being done with Python
language wrappers. It occurred to me that a lot of wheel-reinvention was
going on, and that several tools were wrapping the tla command line with
their own crappy glue. So I set out to further the state of distributed
version control technology by implementing a pythonic object-oriented
wrapper around tla, so people could focus on actually writing
applications instead of dealing (badly) with the quirks of the tla
command line.

PyArch was born. Aaron Bentley, who was being a slightly manic producer
of tla wrappers, quickly became the main user and contributor to this
project.

Six months later, I was looking for a new job. Luckily for me, a
South-African former cosmonaut was busy preparing what turned out to be
the next big thing in free software, and was looking for good
programmers who liked Python and knew how to use tla. Robert Collins
probably said something like "there's this ddaa guy in the #arch channel
who wrote pybaz, the code is only moderately crackful and he's looking
for a job". A few IRC chats later I was working for the still-unnamed
start-up which became Canonical. This was June 2004.

During this time, I actively maintained PyArch. Then Canonical created
baz, at the end of October 2004, PyArch became PyBaz. It grew more and
more complex as baz was being developed, and increasingly divergent
command-lines were supported. By June 2005 PyBaz had grown from a
slightly freaky but cool wrapper to a rather scary crufty mess of a
wrapper, and working on it was becoming increasingly painful and
unrewarding. Especially as it dawned to me what an embarrassment GNU
Arch was.

In November 2005, Launchpad development switched to bzr, and pybaz was
now just a wart to get rid of. It took some time, but today the
Launchpad code base is essentially free of all GNU Arch legacy, and the
only actively used piece of code that I know which still uses PyBaz is
bzrtools, for its baz-import functionality.

So, be Aaron be a good maintainer for this nasty piece of code, and may
PyBaz die in well-deserved obscurity.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 252 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20061129/5a5df257/attachment.pgp