Bzr development stopped

[Parth Malwankar]

It's sad indeed.
I would be very interested in reading the retrospective.

Regards,
Parth
 On Nov 20, 2012 11:14 PM, "Martin Pool" <mbp at sourcefrog.net> wrote:

> 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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