Bzr development stopped

[Juanma Barranquero]

[jumping into the discussion]


On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> This subthread is about whether the Canonical contributor
> agreement is massively inhibiting contribution to Bazaar.
> [...] Therefore I see no reason to try to explain the
> current lull in development of Bazaar by appealing to the inhibiting
> effect of Canonical's contributor agreement.

I agree that the contributor agreement is not the main factor for the
lack of developers (or, at least, there's no clear indication that it
is).

But, going back to the start of the thread, the fact is that there
*is* a lack of developers, obviously. From a recent message by John
Arbash Meinel:

 - [...] 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.
 - 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).
 - [...] Bazaar isn't going away. It is still being actively
maintained, though a little less actively than last year.

Certainly, neither John's comments nor the numbers quoted by Matthew
D. Fuller seem very encouraging. Whether the reason is that potential
developers turn to "sexier" dVCS, or that Bzr adopters are more likely
to be interested in using it as opposed to tinkering with it, or just
that the ambiguous status of Bzr (GNU-but-not-very-GNU,
free-but-dependent-on-Canonical) discourages new blood, the
consequence is that when Canonical diverts its resources, Bzr
stagnates. That does not look to me like a healthy free software
project. I was a bit surprised to read Stefan's comment about pressure
to switch Emacs repo to git, not because I didn't know the pressure
exists, but because for the first time he seemed to be saying that it
wasn't entirely off the table.

If Bzr development continues at the present (glacial) pace, and Emacs
switches to another dVCS, how long would take for other significant
projects (MySQL, Bugzilla, InkScape, Squid) to follow suit?

>From a cynical POV, perhaps Canonical (the company, not the
developers, I mean) just does not care. In their own words, they
already have Bzr mostly where they want it, functionality-wise.

    Juanma