Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Ian Clatworthy]

Russel Winder wrote:

> What is needed is for people like Ian
> who have real data, to visit Fowler's site and add comments to his paper
> to show that Bazaar actually is a player in the game even though from
> his personal experience only Git and Mercurial are. 

I don't have time right now to do this properly. I also feel that
community projects using Bazaar should respond here in preference to a
Canonical staff member like myself.

> On Sat, 2010-02-20 at 15:58 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
>>
>>     Fundamentally there's three version control systems that get broad
>>     approval: subversion (svn), git, and mercurial (hg).
>>
>>     […]
>>     Speaking of DVCSs, there are more than just the two I've highlighted
>>     here. Bazaar, in particular, is one I occasionally hear good things
>>     about, but again I hear about it much less often then git or Mercurial.

I don't doubt that Martin is currently hearing more about Git and
Mercurial than Bazaar. The Agile community are mostly using Java (where
hg is well adopted) and .NET and are pushing Ruby (where Git is well
adopted).

>> Martin Fowler's voice carries a lot of weight in many quarters; it seems
>> Bazaar escaped evaluation only because he doesn't hear about it enough.

Martin is certainly one of my heroes.

The best thing we can do as a community about this is get active and
make the problem go away. Write blogs about cool thing in Bazaar! Submit
articles to magazines and spread the word. We have a *great* product but
it means nothing in the commercial world unless people know about it.

We also have some work to do. I've spent most of my career in the
commercial world and I'm confident I have a good understanding of what's
required to be successful there:

* easy installation
* GUI tools suitable for non-programmers
* great documentation
* mature integration with tools that matter, e.g. IDEs, JIRA
* a track record of others adopting the technology.

I'm working *very* hard on the first 3 in nearly all the spare time I
have. I need plenty of community help though, keeping in mind that I'm
only one person (and I'm mega sick every second week thanks to
chemotherapy).

Great things are possible in short periods of time given some personal
commitment and the right building blocks (e.g. QBzr dialogs). The
initial cut of Explorer took me one weekend and I didn't know Qt when I
started. I'm no rockstar programmer either - just someone who knows
enough Python to be dangerous. :-)

We *desperately* need better IDE integration with the top 5 IDEs: Visual
Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans and X-Code. These need to be
developed, documented and actively maintained by developers using these
tools every day - dog food FTW. Until we have these, we'll miss out
getting a critical mass of adoption in the commercial world.

In summary, Bazaar's biggest issue right now IMNSHO is adoption. Until
we have more of that, people won't know about us and won't adopt us.
It's a chicken-and-egg thing. *You* can make a big difference if you're
keen. Blog, write, hack. Tell your friends and write cool stuff.

Ian C.