bzr 2.1 retrospective

[Ian Clatworthy]

Martin Pool wrote:
> 2.1 is out, it's a good product, and I'd like to now have a bit of a
> retrospective around the release and the whole cycle, looking for both
> good and bad things that we can build on next time.

> Still, in the next cycle it would be good to have one or two bigger
> bangs.  The Canonical staff are going to be helping Ubuntu a fair bit
> so we shouldn't overcommit, but perhaps we could pick one.  If we are
> going to do large changes, it works much better if many people are
> committed.
> 
> * change: pick one or two focus features for 2.2?

Looking at the What's New document I've just put together, I'm blown
away by how much we've achieved *as a community* in the last 4-5 months.
I think that's a direct result of the fact that Canonical staff have
*not* been deeply focussed on large features. Instead, we've put our
energy into helping others contribute.

In the words of James Gosling, innovation happens everywhere. If the
core team does pick large features, I'd like them to build on that
thought. What can we do to encourage innovation? What would smart people
like to do in plugins that they can't already? What hooks do they need?
What infrastructure would help them?

FWIW, Product-As-Platform is high on my list wrt evolving Explorer going
forward. See http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrExplorer/Roadmap. My
vision is this: smart people ought to be able to write a plugin that
adds cool new commands and for those commands to be easily added to
toolbars and context-menus. There should be no need to import APIs from
explorer to enable this:

* simply declaring options for commands with some ordering hints ought
  to give you nice enough dialogs
* simply declaring some XML files ought to hook the commands into the
  necessary places in the UI.

Don't call us, we'll call you.

In the same vein, I think stuff like .bzrmeta/requirements[1] and branch
baggage[2] will be killer core features.

> Vincent has made some plans for better conflict handling but little
> has landed into 2.1.  What if anything should we do differently?
> Maybe he was interrupted too much by other things?

My other vote for a 2.2 theme is "merging must rock". It's easy to dream
about new features but being very, very good at merging is perhaps the
best way to make users love bzr.

Per file merge hooks are great. Vincent's work on making conflict
resolution nicer for edge cases is really important IMO. Cherrypicking
anyone?

> Personally, I've really enjoyed the last few months and feel like
> we're in a pretty good productive zone.

Me too.

> Here's to a great 2.2 cycle,

Ditto.

Thank-you for an excellent, thought-provoking email.

Ian C.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q4/064203.html
[2] http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/DraftSpecs/BranchBaggage