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

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 11:06:37AM +0400 I heard the voice of
John Arbash Meinel, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> 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.

[...]

> 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.

[...]

> 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.

Unfortunately, all that reads as "maintenance mode".  And given the
long-apparent (and, by the last few months evidence, rather confirmed)
status of bzr as "a Canonical project that happens to be open source"
as contrasted to "an open source project that happens to be
Canonical-supported", it's also a near equivalent to other fun words
like "legacy" and, especially in such an active genre, not far removed
from "dead".

(We'll take a short break here for my 6th grade English teacher to pop
up and deliver one of her scathing condemnations of run-on
sentences...)


As Stefan said elsewhere in the thread,

   > I'm beginning to feel a bit like in the bad CVS days where you
   > just had to get used to circumventing its limitations, for lack
   > of actual development.

which is really a place I don't want to return to with a tool I use
all day.  I can't lay any sort of claim to have surveyed the entire
VCS space, but I have fiddled with the major ones.  And compared to
bzr, they were all rather unpleasant, which is why I'm here.

The choice between a tool that's pleasant and has a good chance of
eventually growing the pieces I miss, and one that's unpleasant and
has a good chance of eventually growing the pieces I miss, is very
very easy.  But when the pleasant choice winds up with a very poor
chance of eventually growing those pieces, it's a much harder position
to stake out.

As the project stands, a bzr with no ongoing Canonical push for active
development is a bzr with no active development.  And that's just
another way of saying "hey, if this doesn't isn't already Practically
Perfect In Every Way for you and your problem space, better git to
love git, buddy".  That's...   not the future I would have chosen for
myself   :(



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.