Getting the word out about Bazaar 2.0 - ask your friends to try it!

Ian Clatworthy ian.clatworthy at canonical.com
Wed Oct 14 12:00:16 BST 2009


Anteru wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> FWIW, I'm a developer who is just evaluating alternatives for SVN, and I
> tried Git, Bzr and Hg -- right now, it looks like I'll stick with Bzr.

Hi Anteru,

That's great news. Thanks for letting us know.

> Some stuff you can put forward:

I'm guessing you started your evaluation before we rolled out our new
web site? Hopefully we're communicating those advantages better than we
have in the past?

> But the interesting part for you is why someone like me tried Bzr last:
> The lack of high-profile projects and community pages was something
> which made me think that Bzr is not ready yet.

Bazaar 1.0 scaled to large trees but not deep histories. We've spent a
huge amount of engineering time over the last 12-15 months addressing
that. In the meantime, it's true that many projects have chosen either
Git or Mercurial [1].

We firmly believe Bazaar 2.0 is seriously competitive though. In
addition to the strengths you identified, our rename handling and
efficiency (see http://bazaar-vcs.org/Benchmarks) are worth noting IMO.

> Why is this important?
> Because if you have really huge projects using SCM <X>, people get the
> impression that <X> is going to be well supported in +5 years and scales
> well.

Given Canonical pay my salary, I certainly hope it's still around in 5
years. Ubuntu is going from strength to strength so that's a positive
sign that we're here to stay.

> Of course, the projects where I evaluate it at the moment are
> nowhere that large (the biggest one is ~ 2.5k revisions, 20k files or
> so), but it's good to know yeah, this SCM scales well beyond everything
> you'll need.

We do a lot of scalability testing on large projects, e.g.
OpenOffice.org with 80K files and 260k revisions. I think you're pretty
safe for a while yet. :-)

> Moreover, a bit community virtually guarantees that you
> have plugins for Trac/Redmine/whatever.

Our current plugin count is 110 and growing. The Bazaar community has
done an awesome job putting these together. Higher adoption will
hopefully drive both the quantity and quality of these integrations higher.

> Just to give you an idea why people choose Bzr actually ;)

Much appreciated! It would be nice if you blogged about your experience
and findings.

Ian C.

[1] That's not all bad news for us. Firstly, it validates that
distributed VCS is the way of the future. Secondly, switching to Bazaar
from these tools is doable now, if a bit messy, thanks to "fast-import"
becoming a de-facto interchange format. *I* look at existing Git and Hg
adopters as users on a journey towards bzr and ultimately Bazaar
Explorer. :-)



More information about the bazaar mailing list