Bzr development stopped

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Fri, 2012-11-23 at 12:04 -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> On 12-11-23 11:36 AM, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) wrote:
> > On 23/11/12 11:00 PM, bazaar-request at lists.canonical.com wrote:
> >> I'd be a lot more interested in seeing some bug-fixes installed
> >> in the bzr-dev tree, to tell you the truth.
> > 
> > Isn't the answer a public fork ??  There are so many examples of
> > this working (gcc => egcs=>gcc, OpenOffice.org => LibreOffice come
> > to mind)
> 
> In my experience, forks usually happen when people are unhappy with
> the leadership of a project.  (Not necessarily all people, and it may
> be a cordial disagreement about direction or focus.)  Is that the
> problem we've been having?  I haven't seen complaints that people
> can't get their branches landed.
> 
> The project actually is designed to avoid single points of failure, so
> that any 2 of the 33 approved reviewers can get a branch landed.
> 
> I think the problem is that there isn't as much development as we'd
> like.  But a fork won't fix that, unless for some reason the
> organization of the project is significantly hindering development.
I don't think it's really that there is disagreement about the direction
of the project, but that there is a complete lack of direction.

Canonical, as Bazaars corporate steward, has been setting the direction
for the last couple of years (e.g. UDD) - but no more. 

I'm no longer at Canonical, where most projects are in Bazaar. Almost
all of my personal projects are hosted in Git these days for practical
reasons (most people know how to deal with Git), and I thus no longer
have much reason to use or work on Bazaar. 

For myself to be interested in contributing to Bazaar (and I suspect for
others as well), I think it's important to have a vision for the
project. Retrospectives would be useful here.

I've considered doing a friendly fork (no CLA's, etc) of Bazaar that
integrated bzr-git and bzr-fastimport (and perhaps other plugins) and
switched it to the git format as the default format, rather than 2a.
That way it would just be another part of the git ecosystem rather than
its own small corner of the world.

Cheers,

Jelmer