Call for better Bazaar packaging on Ubuntu

[Ian Clatworthy]

Hi all,

We've recently put together a bzr-windows team to improve Bazaar for
Windows users. That team has been discussing packaging and installation
in particular and we have plans for making a better all-in-one installer
real soon now. The "Bazaar Desktop" installer will include and install
by default at least the following:

* Bazaar Explorer
* QBzr
* commonly used bzr plugins
* core bzr
* nice documentation.

I think that's great news! The average Windows user cares a lot about
easy-to-install (batteries included), easy-to-use and well documented.

If downloads are any guide, we have 35K+ users on Windows and I'd expect
our Ubuntu users to be well in excess of that. So, I'd like to suggest a
similar effort to improve our packaging on Ubuntu. In particular, I'd
like to see an entry in Add/Remove Applications called "Bazaar Desktop"
will similar contents to the above:

* Bazaar Explorer
* QBzr (#)
* bzr-gtk & Olive
* commonly used bzr plugins
* core bzr
* nice documentation.

We should arguably also clean-up the *existing* Bazaar-related packages
in Add/Remove. There are 3 - Bazaar, Bazaar Area Notification, Olive
Bazaar Branch Manager - and all 3 of them have exactly the same
description. :-(

Does that sound a good idea? If so, can someone with more Debian/Ubuntu
foo than me please volunteer to make it happen for karmic?

Ian C.

#: Explorer 0.6 lets you switch between using the QBzr applets and the
bzr-gtk ones, assuming both are installed. QBzr is required though and,
even when bzr-gtk is selected as the app suite to use, it will fallback
to the QBzr applets when bzr-gtk ones don't exist.