Bazaar 1.0 and User Guide plans for this week

Ian Clatworthy ian.clatworthy at internode.on.net
Tue Nov 13 02:37:00 GMT 2007


All,

I've just returned from AllHands, an annual get together of Canonical
staff from across the world. While I was there, I got to spend time with
poolie (Martin), lifeless (Robert), jameinel (John), spiv (Andrew) and
mrevell (Matt) among many others talking about Bazaar and what we need
to focus on. Not surprisingly, the message from developers at Canonical
is no different from that everywhere else: Bazaar is really, really cool
but there are a few things still blocking mass adoption including:

1. Yet to reach 1.0
2. Performance of some use cases still needs attention
3. GUI tool maturity (and 3rd party integration more broadly).

As Martin has suggested, we want to release 1.0 soon. That doesn't mean
we're done. It does mean the tool works for many people. More on this below.

As Robert has indicated, we plan to continue our focus on performance in
coming months. Led by Robert, we have made tremendous progress in recent
months and we have a very good idea now of what else we need to do. It's
true that a fairly deep knowledge of the internals helps in getting the
various changes required made, so we think it makes sense for Canonical
staff to make this a priority. However, there is still plenty of
opportunity for anyone else interested in performance to help, e.g.
benchmarking, profiling, submitting patches, helping on related tasks.

We are also looking at how we can assist the fantastic work going on in
the community w.r.t. GUI apps. Things are rapidly evolving here which is
great news! If anyone has recently reviewed our various GUI tools and
has ideas on how they ought to evolve from here, please speak up soon.
Should we pick one and turn it into a "killer" all singing GUI app? I
personally like choice so perhaps we need to look at consistency across
apps (eg. usability guidelines and GUI-friendly APIs) instead? There is
no right answer here but usability and Just Works are core values of
what Bazaar is about, so GUI tools are clearly important to us.

Returning to 1.0, I think there are a few things we obviously still need
to do:

1. Better documentation.
2. Triage bugs so we have an accurate understanding of known issues.
3. Get patches submitted for the Critical ones.
4. Get our defaults correct, e.g. make packs the default format.

I'll be attending the OSDC 2007 conference next week giving a tutorial
on Bazaar and talking about DVCS in general. If you're coming along,
please be sure to come and say hi.

My personal focus for the rest of this week (4 days) will be publishing
a (draft) Bazaar 1.0 User Guide. I hope to publish a chapter or two each
day so people can progressively review it and help where they can. This
won't be fully complete by 1.0 but it should cover the core
functionality in a clear, easy-to-read way. Post 1.0, Matt Revell is
hoping to add the detail on the pieces missing with input/assistance
from the community.

If you need patches reviewed this week as well, please let me know and
I'll do what I can.

Cheers,
Ian C.



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