Bazaar and Java IDEs (was Bazaar and Visual Studio)

[Francis Devereux]

On 15 Sep 2010, at 02:20, Max Bowsher wrote:

> On 15/09/10 01:50, Philip Peitsch wrote:
>> Just to clarify a little, lack of IDE integration isn't quite the same
>> as lack of GUI.  Bazaar actually has rather good guis for commits,
>> updates, diffs etc., and integration options for external merge/diff
>> tools.  All the gui variants of bazaar are prefixed with q... for
>> example, qcommit, qupdate, qdiff, qlog etc. (bzr help commands will show
>> all available commands)
> 
> Indeed, QBzr rocks :-)
> 
>> I am interested as to what IDE integrations are required by your devs
>> that isn't offered by bzr explorer, or has been proven to be more
>> difficult on the command line?  The cry for IDE integration seems to
>> happen quite frequently, but in my experience, unless the IDE
>> integration focuses on the right thing, it can be quite useless.
> 
> I personally am quite a light user of IDE integration (I habitually
> commit from the command line). However, the things that I really miss
> the most are in-IDE indication of locally modified files. Tie-in to move
> files in bzr when they are moved by the IDE refactoring is also a must.
> I suspect at least some of my co-workers would demand in-IDE diff and
> commit as a minimum.
> 
>> Also, you might be interested in the Eclipse Bazaar plugin:
>> http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrEclipse
> 
> I tried it - but it seemed incredibly unpolished, and the project seems
> to be completely dormant.
> 
> qbzr-eclipse is actually a lot better, though then you have to accept
> that it's not really an IDE integration, but a launcher for external
> tools - that's quite a hard sell, when your audience is an office full
> of developers used to Eclipse's tight CVS and SVN integrations.

Hi, I thought I'd chime in with my experiences using and promoting Bazaar within a commercial development team.  I'm not demanding that anyone "fix" anything but just want to provide a data point.

I have been using Bazaar on Mac OS X with IntelliJ IDEA and the bzr4j plugin at work since last year (I'm working with a team of about 5 developers on a Java project with a Subversion repository).  The plugin isn't perfect and I use the command line bzr client and Emacs vc.el too, but I've found it to be a great improvement over Subversion.  However, I'm really interested in VCSes and am prepared to deal with a few rough edges; my coworkers aren't particularly interested in VCSes and just want to get their jobs done.  A couple of weeks ago I tried to set up Bazaar for one of my coworkers who needed to do some work in a branch, so that he could take advantage of Bazaar's merging.  He uses Eclipse on Windows.  It took me a few hours to get Bazaar on Windows talking to our Subversion server over SSH, but I got there in the end.  Unfortunately I couldn't get the bzr-eclipse plugin to work on Windows - it always says "Nothing to commit" when I go to Team->Commit even when "bzr status" on the command line shows uncommitted changes. There may well be a way of making it work, but by this time my coworker had lost enthusiasm for trying Bazaar and I didn't feel like forcing it on him in case he had a really bad experience that put it off trying it again in future.

So in summary, I think Bazaar is great but it's frustrating that I can't roll it out to the whole team (and replace our Subversion server) because of lack of polish in things like IDE integration.

Francis