Bzr development stopped WAS Re: Branching from just a part of

[John Arbash Meinel]

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> I walk down bzr.dev (up to date as of I'm typing this) mainline,
> and count up for each month the number of revs, and a cumulative
> +/- from diffstat.  The latter is of course a very coarse measure
> of anything, but it's a passable eyeball of how many lines get
> changed.  Only touching mainline revs, so I'm not counting how much
> churn happens on the feature branches on the way to landed stuff.
> 
> Full output attached.  But here's the last ~12 months inline:
> 
> 2011-08:   68 revs, +9660   -1327 2011-09:   68 revs, +16428
> -5672 2011-10:   54 revs, +3999   -2332 2011-11:   95 revs, +9454
> -3595 2011-12:   77 revs, +9396   -4421 2012-01:   49 revs, +6528
> -6092 2012-02:   21 revs, +332994 -25090 2012-03:   39 revs, +3975
> -5392 2012-04:    6 revs, +1223   -382 2012-05:    1 revs, +6
> -2 2012-06:    7 revs, +80753  -948 2012-07:   17 revs, +2115
> -1365 2012-08:    8 revs, +3672   -174
> 

Interesting to see the actual numbers. I imagine there will be another
spike up from this week but its certainly accurate to say that
development work has gone down considerably.

- From Canonical's side, the team that was primarily on Bazaar feature
development has shifted focus to other projects. Bazaar is still fully
maintained, now by the wider 'Launchpad' group rather than just the
Bazaar team. (In practice that means the same people still do most of
the work, but more people are supposed to do code reviews, etc.)

For example, this week we rolled out bzr-2.5.1 into Launchpad (for
code imports and code hosting, etc). There are a couple bits of
fallout from that.[1] So I put together some fixes, and we'll likely
be rolling out a bzr-2.5.2 [2].

I think fundamentally Bazaar does most of what Canonical needs, and
the team has been focusing more on other bits around Bazaar
(Launchpad, package-importer, bzr-svn integration, etc). Also,
Launchpad and Bazaar have never really been meant as products in their
own right, but more as facilities to build Ubuntu. And while not
perfect, they do a pretty darn good job of it, and it makes sense to
focus more on other areas of development.

So for those following along, your beloved Bazaar isn't going away. It
is still being actively maintained, though a little less actively than
last year.

John
=:->


[1]: We added an RPC to make lightweight checkouts work much better
with a remote server, but that ended up exposing a bug in the
client-side where it wasn't handling the returned content in the right
order. And another bug where you would get a lock conflict if you
branched from a lightweight checkout of a remote repository and
created a new tree at the target. As of writing this, it is in PQM
running through the test suite.

[2]: There also seems to be a problem with the retry-on-disconnect
logic that appears to be affecting some Tarmac installs. The bzr-2.5
server disconnects clients if they've been idle for more than 5 min.
And Tarmac likes to create a connection, run the full test suite, and
then finish with the same connection. Internally bzrlib should be
reconnecting, but it seems to be trying to reconnect, and then failing
2 times in a row. (one is expected, I don't quite see why the retry is
also failing.)

Once we get that sorted out, we'll probably also backport the retry
logic to the 2.1 series where it was originally developed for Lucid.
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