How can we ensure Bazaar (bzr) remains active?

[Brendan Simon (eTRIX)]

On 21/09/2015 7:54 pm, bazaar-request at lists.canonical.com wrote:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 18:34:54 -0700
> From: Kevin <m1ndstr3ngthapps at gmail.com>
> To: bazaar at lists.canonical.com
> Subject: How can we ensure Bazaar (bzr) remains active?
> Message-ID: <55FF5EBE.6040906 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>
> Hello, Bazaar users/devs:
>
> I'm a professional software engineer and have been using Mercurial 
> (|hg|) DVCS for about a year. I've tried Git but I did not like it, 
> Mercurial was much more user-friendly. These two SCM projects are very 
> active; lots of contributors committing often to trunk. I just recently 
> discovered Bazaar (|bzr|) and I have found it to be the very best, 
> user-friendly, intuitive DVCS; more than any other.
>
> Sadly, the latest stable release is over 2 years old, and the latest 
> stable Windows release is over 3 years old! :-( This detracts potential 
> users from using bzr, thinking that it must be not well supported; or 
> that it is not as popular as git and hg because it is somehow "not as good".
>
> I would love to contribute and help fix bugs and implement new features 
> to ensure that this excellent SCM project continues with a healthy 
> development community.
>
> I've already switched my projects to use bzr and have begun to use 
> Launchpad.
>
> I joined the bazaar mailing list today, asked questions in Ask Ubuntu 
> and Ubuntu's FB page, and have submitted a request in bazaar's Launchpad 
> page to join the bzr-core team (request currently pending).
>
> Please let me know anything else I can do to help. I want the Bazaar 
> DVCS to be more active, I think it's a great software tool! :-) We 
> cannot (and should not) allow such an awesome DVCS to fall into a state 
> of being unused, ignored, and eventually abandoned. Rather, let's 
> improve it, spread it, and use it!
>
> Thanks:
> Kevin

I originally chose Bazaar for my DVCS (based on the marketing of the 3
main contenders, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar), because the UI sounded well
planned, was supported by a reputable open-source friendly company
(Canonical), and as written in 100% (or close to) python (a language I
really like).

I ended up switching to Git because Bazaar activity seemed to dwindle as
core developers moved on to other things.  Also because I couldn't find
a decent GUI, and good quality Git GUIs were available (e.g.
SourceTree), lots of modern IDEs (e.g. Eclipse) have good support for
Git,and choice of some hosted repositories (GitHub, BitBucket, GitLabs,
etc).
Git was now the defacto DVCS so I ended up not trying to fight the system

I've now been using Git more regularly at a new job, and though it is
working I do see some of it's complexity -- part of which is
understanding the whole Git workflow and working consistently with other
team members (which I'm sure is the same for any DVCS).  The speed or
design of sourcetree is also giving me some grief, though that may be
the underlying Git?

One thing that may get Bazaar some recognition is to get some
integration into a popular DVCS hosted provider.  I am thinking
Atlassian and BitBucket (what I like about BitBucket is the unlimited
free private repositories).  I don't know how Bazaar compares to
Mercurial, but if it has some significant advantages, then having
Atalassian take it on officially or unofficially, and get it supported
in SourceTree and BitBucket, then Bazaar may slowly gain enough momentum
to make it viable again -- maybe even the DVCS of choice.
I imagine it would only work if there are no road blocks from Canonical
(if there are any).

So in essence:
    * a good GUI (SourceTree?)
    * a popular hosted repository solution (BitBucket)
    * some good plugins for the major IDEs (Eclipse and Visual Studio)

Cheers, Brendan.

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