Why Bazaar is not used in many project hosting sites?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Canol Gokel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My question is that why most of the big project hosting sites does not support
> Bazaar while they support Git and Mercurial? The ones I'm aware of are Savannah,
> Google Code and ActiveState... Also there are project hosting sites which
> provides only Git or Mercurial source control. While the only project hosting
> sites I'm aware of which provide Bazaar support is Launchpad and SourceForge.
> 
And fedorahosted.org

> Is supporting Bazaar hard for technical reasons? Or it is just not well
> advertised or something? I'm using Bazaar for a few months and I'm very
> satisfied with it so far but the idea that I'm stuck with Launchpad and
> SourceForge both of which I don't quite like as much as Bazaar, makes me
> thinking of learning Mercurial or Git while I haven't gone too far with Bazaar.

There's been a couple of issues, some resolved, that we've encountered
with maintaining bzr for fedorahosted:

* Web interface.  The web interface support was very bad with several
competitors of which none were standouts.  This has gotten better now
that loggerhead has matured but we have to get some time to get it
running with mod_wsgi, test it on our servers (we had to move off of
mod_python which interferes with mod_wsgi), let user's know their old
URLs are going to break, etc.

* bzr's lack of a stable platform.  bzr has several independent pieces
which all keep changing.  The two that are the worst for us are
repository format and API that server-side things (like the web
interface) need.  With releases every month that might or might not be
incompatible with previous releases, we have a hard time both providing
support for the repository formats that people want to use and the API's
that the services that run on bzr need.  We're currently constrained to
bzr-1.3, for instance, since the web interface we're currently using
won't run on anything newer.

* Lack of features shipped with bzr.  Due in part to the possibility of
changes in API and in part due to the work that needs to go into
packaging, we don't have all the plugins that we'd like for the bzr
server.  A server-side email commit, for instance, is something that a
lot of people want with their SCMs but we just haven't found the time to
provide.  If this was shipped with bzr, unittested with the new
releases, etc, then it would be a simple matter to enable this feature
instead of making the decision to support an SCM without this feature.

-Toshio

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