Bzr development stopped

[Carlos Mundi]

Martin and Alexander and Robert and everyone else who worked on bzr...

Thanks for all your work.  I no longer watch this list, but I maintain
private communication with Martitza and a few other ex-bzr users who used
to hang out here but have moved on.  We have all accepted git.  I sadly
migrated my last bzr repo to git at the end of summer.

You guys know better than most the potential and reality of bzr.  Though
there is an undeniable gap, some good things can live on if they are
adopted by other communities.

Our departed friend Ian had a great user-centric vision for Bazaar
Explorer, which almost achieved perfection under the leadership of
Alexander and others.

So I hope someone will apply what was learned here to git, which still lags
in the GUI area.  Sorry, TortoiseGit has improved much but is still not as
good as Bazaar Explorer in concept or execution, and obviously it is
Windows only And not all of us want to use GitHub or struggle with
Gitoruous.  On the other hand, GitBlit shows a lot of promise and could
benefit from the Bazaar Explorer experience.

While bzr and bzr-explorer may be done, the user-experience principles
which guided them remain vital and hopefully will continue to inspire the
developers of other scm systems.

Thanks for everything and know that you did good things,

Carlos
 On Nov 20, 2012 10:44 AM, "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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