Bzr development stopped

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, 2012-11-21 at 04:42 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> I think this is pretty accurate, and I feel sad about it too.  
> 
> 
> Perhaps I should post a retrospective too.

Here is mine:
http://www.stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html

Cheers,

Jelmer

> 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
> 
>