Bazaar still below the radar when evaluating VCS tools

[Parth Malwankar]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Joke de Buhr <joke at seiken.de> wrote:
> 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.
>>

......

>
>
>
> 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.
>

I think I should add my reasons for switch to bzr to the list :-)

I decided to move to a DVCS sometime during bzr 1.13, hg 1.1 and
git (1.??) timeframe. I needed to run my DVCS on a hosting server
on which I didn't have rights build and install software (C code). hg
didn't get pure python support till 1.2. git was definitely out. With bzr
I really liked that I could untar bzr in a folder and start using it by
just putting it in the path. Some other things I liked was support for
ftp, sftp (I was using both for some time before switching to ssh). I
also like bzr support for explicit file tracking. Though I worked mostly
on Linux, Windows being a first class citizen was important to me
as I sometimes need to work on Windows.

A lot has changed since then (in all the big three DVCSes), but
some of these advantages like ftp, sftp support still hold (I think).
But somehow this doesn't seem to get highlighted in DVCS
discussions.

The way I see it, the biggest reason I stick to bzr is because it is
flexible enough to cater to different needs (not just workflows
but also the constraints I had to deal with that time).
To add, bzr-svn, bzr-git and bzr-hg are really cool plugins.

Regards,
Parth