Bzr development stopped

[Martin Pool]

I think this is pretty accurate, and I feel sad about it too.

Perhaps I should post a retrospective too.


On 11 November 2012 18:45, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:

> I'm sorry for being late for 2 months and only now trying to say
> something. I'm sorry for being grumpy or saying something unpleasant.
>
> When I saw the subject of this thread in the mailing list I was very
> sad, because it was just a confirmation of what I knew before. So I
> was unable to force myself to read all this thread, just to avoid even
> more sadness. I read it now and while I see positive tone in
> discussion, but the outcome is still rather pessimistic.
>
> I never was Canonical employee, but I worked on bzr some time as some
> of us knows. So please forgive me my open-hearted mail, but what I saw
> in 2007, 2008 and so on - I didn't really like what was going on. In
> short: there were a lot of promises what bzr can do, but bzr never
> reached those goals. I stopped advocate bzr in 2008 or maybe 2009.
> Because I didn't have a real arguments.
>
> Why?
>
> There is still nested trees implemented but unmerged lying on launchpad.
>
> There is still no proper solution for line-endings conversions, or
> keywords. I've tried to push the ball in 2008 but it was my own the
> biggest fiasco.
>
> There is no [simple] setup for local private bzr server where I can
> put my working projects, and bzr-access script in contrib/ is rather
> too basic and limited. Today on my last job where I've been using bzr
> since 2006 I run dead simple `bzr serve --allow-writes` just because I
> am either too stupid to setup the proper access control or too lazy to
> dive in and experiment when I know this needed only for couple of
> developers.
>
> There is no third-party site that allows me for small fee to host my
> private projects, and hosting private projects on LP did never seem
> like a real answer, mostly of the lack of visibility of this feature
> and hence availability for people. I was under impression (possibly
> wrong) it was discouraged by Canonical itself.
>
> I think the crucial point was in 2009 when it was obvious for
> Canonical management that bzr is unable to beat hg/git, so most of the
> efforts was put into UDD. Since then I saw a real change in the bzr
> direction.
>
> What I see today? git is everywhere and that means that I have to
> learn it. Where is bzr? On Launchpad [only].
>
> For me bzr is not going to really compete in the near(?) future. I did
> feel this for last 3 or 4 years. And that made me very sad all this
> years. I've spent too many years working on bzr and other related
> stuff in my spare time. But last year was stagnant even for me. Today
> I can't find the reason to continue work even on qbzr. I feel like I
> stay in the village while all citizens left it, although some
> strangers sometimes arrived and moved on quickly.
>
> Most of bzr hackers I used to know since 2005-2007 are not in this
> boat anymore. Martin, Andrew, Robert left Canonical. For their own
> reasons, but. Ian passed away. Guys who worked on qbzr/explorer stuff
>  with me are not here anymore. No wonder I feel sadness.
>
> About Contributor Agreement.
> As a developer I worried about this contributor agreement before sign
> it. Just because I don't understand this legal stuff. But then just
> sign it and moved on. Just add to the statistics.
>
> And yes, the hardest part is writing proper tests. I know it's very
> important, and that taught me a lot. But it was always hard. And also
> the complexity of the project itself. There is a lot of good features
> in the code, but overall there is too much code to work with. And
> sometimes I think that strong focus on backward complexity is also
> makes bzr hacking very hard. Backward compatibility is very good for
> users (and I'm user too), but it makes developer's life much more harder.
>
> I know the tests are important for the project itself. But for happy
> users that is not the most important thing. (Sorry Vincent)
>
>
>


-- 
Martin
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