Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Joke de Buhr]

On Friday 26 February 2010 07:47:00 Ben Finney wrote:
> Joke de Buhr <joke at seiken.de> writes:
> > It doesn't cover darcs, fossil, monotone and svk either.
> 
> Right. But those are both less mature (in terms of feature set and
> supported workflows) and far less popular (in terms of projects and
> organisations using them) than the top three.
> 
> The problem is not so much “our favourite VCS isn't being mentioned,
> let's have a whinge”.
> 
> Rather, the problem is “Bazaar is getting far less recognition and
> critical evaluation than seems warranted by its fitness for task,
> maturity, and user satisfaction. What's the cause, and what specifically
> needs to be done to rectify it?”

Before I got hooked on bazaar I thought of bazaar as "that ubuntu think".

When I decided to switch from svn to a distributed version control system I 
knew about git being "the kernel thing", mercurial being "the other thing used 
by mozilla (and others)" and there was knowledge about bazaar as being "that 
ubuntu thing".

I tried using git and it was horrible than I tried mercurial and it was ok. 
Later on not completely satisfied with mercurial I decided to at least look at 
"that ubuntu thing" and I sticked with it.

The point is I think bazaar is coupled too tightly with ubuntu. It's not that 
it's necessarily a bad think which would result in a bad implementation. It's 
not a good think either then people start evaluating distributed version 
control systems. The decision to start with bazaar, git or mercurial is based 
on your guts rather than pros and cons. If you like the system you tried first 
you stick with it and most likely don't try another one. In that case it not 
too good to be known as "that ubuntu think".

It might help to emphasize more on project's that use bazaar like mysql or 
emacs. Maybe a weekly column like "MySQL: that's why we chose bazaar!" on the 
front page of http://bazaar.canonical.com/.

And changing the url from bazaar.canonical.com back to bazaar-vcs.org might 
help to be a just a little more independent from ubuntu, a little more like 
"dvcs for the masses" not just for ubuntu.

For the record I switched from debian to ubuntu because of the more recent 
software. I love my ubuntu and even use ubuntu on servers rather than debian.



Apart of that some things where bazaar is way better than git but aren't 
emphasized that much but may be especially important for businesses:
  - central server workflow like svn (checkin, checkout)
  - smart server via apache:
    - support for virtual users (ldap, mysql, postgresql)
    - fully encrypted (passwords and data)
    - byzantine fault tolerance
    - permissions on branch level (stacked branches)
    - server hooks
  - offline mode (unbind)
  - loggerhead gui

If a business would use git and requires full encryption they need to use git 
over webdav. Therefore they can't have server hooks and anyone with a valid  
password (stolen or hacked) can use any webdav client to delete the entire 
repository.

With bazaar's smart server they could only add (junk) revisions but the 
original data would still be left intact and the original state could easily 
be restored by branching.
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