Bzr development stopped

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 03:06:53PM +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 10:15:03PM +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > 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.
> I've put a branch up at lp:~jelmer/bzr/integrated that disables the
> copyright check (since bzr-svn has non-Canonical copyright
> holders) and merges in the fastimport and svn plugins.
> 
> There is another branch up at lp:~jelmer/bzr/merge-bzr-git that
> attempts to merge in bzr-git. Unfortunately a large number of
> tests to do with writing to git repositories still fail at the moment
> (http://samba.org/~jelmer/bzr-git.txt).  I don't think that's easily
> fixable without making some changes to way file id handling works
> (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2011q2/072368.html).
> 
> I'm going to see whether I can manage to get full git format support
> working by making some blunt changes to the APIs. Help welcome.
This was an interesting experiment, but I'm not going to pursue it any
further.

It's been 6 months or so since I last touched the bzr-git codebase,
so this refreshed my memory about some of the remaining problems. Getting
all of the tests to work would take a significant amount of time
(months?), more than I want to spend on it.

Cheers,

Jelmer