Fwd: Improvements of the Bazaar distro for Mac OS

[Martin Pool]

(please CC Alex if you reply..)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alex Popescu ☢ <the.mindstorm at gmail.com>
Date: 7 Jan 2008 23:26
Subject: Improvements of the Bazaar distro for Mac OS
To: Martin Pool <mbp at sourcefrog.net>, Szilveszter Farkas
<szilveszter.farkas at gmail.com>, Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org>


Hi all!

Firstly, I would like to wish you all the best for the new year.

A couple of weeks ago we have been discussing about some possible ways
to improve the friendliness of Bazaar for Mac users.

I am writing this to you as I haven't been getting feedback on the irc
channel and I am not on the user mailing list (I know this is my
fault, but I am currently on too many lists).

So, back to the main discussion. Currently Bazaar is available for Mac
Leopard users in a disk image format. And this is nice and cool.
Unfortunately, not the same happens for the Tiger users (the previous
version), which I think they are still more than the Leopard. As far
as I can say the main cause of this is that Tiger is coming with a
very old version of Python, which would require quite a few
dependencies to be installed in order to get Bazaar working.

However, as I previously explained, I think things may be better. And
here is what I suggest:

1/ create a Bazaar disk image that assumes CPython 2.5 is installed.
This should be made clear in the download page. CPython 2.5.1 is
available for Mac OS Tiger, so users may get it immediately.

2/ Include in the Bazaar disk image the nice utilities (like Bazaar
SVN integration, etc.). I know this is a delicate problem as this
relies on some patches. However, I do think that people knowing how to
build this patched SVN version should make it available (even if as
part of the install).
I am pretty sure the Mac users will be thankful for this, as they SVN
status is not so good -- the last SVN version available for Mac is
1.4.4 which is more than 6 months old.

Even if I haven't used Bazaar before (being an SVN, Mercurial user), I
do think that Bazaar has some very cool features that are not
available in other systems. And I believe that making things a bit
more friendly, so that people may get up to speed immediately, will
help a lot spreading the Bazaar "bug".

I hope to hear back good news from you,

./alex
--
.w( the_mindstorm )p.

PS: I am aware that all these are currently available in a form or
another (through Fink or MacPorts). However, I do believe that giving
the chance to more users to try out Bazaar without asking them to pass
through a long (and large size) installation process will increase the
chances of Bazaar adoption. Indeed, this is my personal opinion and it
is based only on my experience.


-- 
Martin