What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Ian Clatworthy]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> This implies that Bazaar developers don't know what Canonical wants
> and haven't been addressing it in the past.

Huh? That's simply wild speculation.

Canonical has been *very* open about what it expects from the core team:

1. Make a tool developers love to use.

2. High performance & efficiency (remove the #1 adoption blocker for bzr
   1.x by providing a better default format and better code in 2.x).

3. Make it easier for new users to get into Bazaar: better docs, better
   UI, remove the need to think about formats.

These have expanded over time. Adding one doesn't make earlier ones
redundant, though newer ones receive more short-term focus.

As Martin's email announced, Canonical is now adding a forth:

4. Think about the bigger picture and the role of the VCS from code
   import/migration to packaging. Solve that for Ubuntu developers and
   you're a long way there to solving it for other teams as well.

That's totally consistent with my "Community-Agile Software Guidance"
paper published 15 months ago btw.[1]

We're having a Bazaar sprint next week. We'll be discussing 2.1
priorities there and communicating what comes out of that then. If you
want to see *particular* UI issues addressed in parallel with other
work, let us know what matters to you and we can use that input in our
planning process. Please raise bugs or put together blueprints (if not
already done) and register them on the Wiki page I've just created for
that purpose:

  http://bazaar-vcs.org/MyTopUiComplaints

At some point, it would be good to have a broader user survey about how
we did with 2.0 and what we need to do better, both process wise and
product wise. If someone wants to step forward and run that, speak up.

Clarifying my earlier response, the "FUD" I struggle with is that Bazaar
is disadvantaged by it's association with Canonical. There's a *wide*
spectrum of perspectives from communities/team that insist on strong
corporate backing to those that fear "lock-in" of various forms. In my
experience, choosing a VCS is no small decision and the silent majority
accurately fall on the first half of that spectrum. I can't prove that
though. Maybe there are projects where Bazaar was the best technical
choice but another tool was selected because Canonical is backing
Bazaar. I'm not aware of any project where that was true. OTOH, many
organisations select Bazaar because Canonical is standing behind it.

I also believe that "lock-in" fears are largely unfounded. We actively
encourage contributions from anyone and everyone. We're not preventing
anyone from making Bazaar better and would be happy for other companies
or organisation to get more involved. I agree we could do a better job
of getting community contributions (and *my* contributions for that
matter!) through the review queue faster.

> In the case of the Python VCS PEP, however, the main image
> problem was performance

Right. An updated performance comparison between Bazaar and Mercurial on
the Python code base would indeed be interesting.

Ian C.

[1]
http://people.canonical.com/~ianc/papers/community-agile/community-agile.html