bzr 2.3b2: since you asked....

[der Mouse]

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to forward it to some other set of recipients instead if you think it
appropriate.]

Today, I fetched bzr 2.3b2.  The README ends with

| Our mission is to make a version control tool that developers LOVE to use
| and that casual contributors feel confident with. Please let us know how
| we're going.

I don't normally write mail like this; it's too close to yelling "YOU
SUCK!" - hardly constructive.  But, you asked - and, if you never hear
that these are problems for anyone, there's no chance they'll change.
(Not that it's all that large a chance as it is, but at least it's
nonzero.)

Here are reasons/ways you have failed in your mission with respect to
me.  I'm sure there are plenty of people for whom the issues I mention
are not problematic, and there probably are points on which you think
the problem is with me, not with bzr (or you).  That's fine; I don't
really expect to change your mind about any of these.  But, since you
explicitly asked, I figured the least I could do is answer.

- Your choice of language counts heavily avainst you.  Having to
  bludgeon a large (ca. 60 megs) new language package into building is
  a substantial barrier, especially when it's one which has drunk the
  ./configure koolaid (see
  ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouse/blah/2009-11-20-1.html, also
  available at
  http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/2009-11-20-1.html in case
  you prefer dumbed-down interfaces, for my attitude towards configure
  scripts).

- Your hiding your download behind https: for no visible reason counts
  against you.  Your doing so when the actual download itself is http:
  loses you more points.

- Your apparent belief that it is suitable to provide only a Web
  interface for bug reporting counts against you.  (I find it telling
  that on http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/ the
  section on "Integrating Bazaar into your environment" appears to
  assume that "[my] environment" means something Web, which could
  hardly be more false.)

- Your choice of license counts against you.  I find the GPL rather
  deeply hypocritical ("we're going to make this free by restricting
  what you can do with it" - say what?), and find political polemics
  completely inappropriate in a copyright license.

- Your integrating the guts of openssh into your program loses you a
  lot and actually may render bzr unusable for me.  See below.

- As a comparatively minor point, I'm having trouble figuring out how
  bzr repositories can be named.  A colleague (see below) gave me a
  pseudo-URL of the form bzr+ssh://host/path/, but I have had no
  success finding any indication what alternatives are accepted.
  bzr(1) does not seem to have any documentation on this, and the only
  SEE ALSO it has is a pointer to a Web page (bringing me back to your
  apparent belief that Web pages are a suitable interface for anyone).
  Even looking at the Web page does not help; perhaps I just haven't
  found the right sequence of apparently-unrelated links to follow, or
  perhaps it's not accessible without javascript or some such, or maybe
  it's my inexpertise with the Web, but I've been unable to find such
  documentation there either.

As mentioned above, I discovered that you appear to integrate openssh's
internals into bzr.  Given the other issues above, I decided it was
probably easier to find a work machine with bzr on it and do the
checkout there.  I have my own ssh implementation, which I prefer
substantially to openssh for a number of reasons not really relevant
here.  I was rather shocked to find bzr prompting me for the passphrase
to the identity I apparently have lying around in the openssh location
(I'm not even sure what its passphrase is); upon siccing strace (the
machine in question is Linux) on bzr, I find that it is forking and
execing ssh -V - thereby eliciting an error message and a failure exit,
since my ssh doesn't like that command line.  This is the worst of both
worlds: you appear to depend on there being an external ssh executable,
but, even after getting reasonably clear evidence it isn't the one
you're expecting and thus the user can be presumed to prefer something
other than openssh's interface, you proceed to present a
basically-openssh interface anyway.

By now you are probably wondering why I'm trying to use bzr at all.
The answer is, in a word, "work": at work, a colleague set up a
particular repository using bzr, and it would be convenient if I could
check out its contents.  By now I'm beginning to think I'll have to ask
him to check it out and give me a copy of the resulting files.

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