How can we ensure Bazaar (bzr) remains active?

Tue Sep 22 02:35:59 UTC 2015

I am comfortable with hg and git, but I just don't think that they're as 
good as bzr for correctly representing a good branch model. For more 
detail, the following blog post describes very well why I think bzr does 
the best job -- http://duckrowing.com/2013/12/26/bzr-init-a-bazaar-tutorial/

Just because git is the Gorilla in the DVCS space doesn't mean it's 
actually the better tool. In fact, I think it's not very good. "How do I 
know which commits were part of the feature-foo branch?" If the branch 
ref was not published, or no longer exists, there's no way. That's a 
fail. :-/
Whereas in bzr, the commit stores metadata about it's branch nick; 
perfect! :-)

I see that hardly anyone is going to create and use Launchpad accounts 
just to work on bzr projects. They get a lot more benefit from creating 
a GitHub account and being able to work on thousands of popular open 
source projects hosted therein. I can't think of how to provide more 
incentive to use Launchpad...

Bazaar Explorer is a pretty good GUI, I quite like it.

Thanks:
Kevin

On 09/21/2015 05:52 AM, Fred Zimmerman wrote:
> I began using bzr a few years back simply because it was the default 
> with Ubuntu. I figured that would be a safe choice! Now I wish I had 
> gone with git... but I can do what I need to do in bzr and it will not 
> generate business value for me to traverse the git learning curve. 
> Under these circumstances, with a small / dwindling dev community and 
> a hugely exploding alternative, I think the best bet for the bzr 
> community is to *keep things working*: fix bugs, update plugins, adapt 
> to new tools in the external environment (Python 3).  It seems to me 
> that bzr's future is as a clean, stable, relatively user-friendly 
> alternative to git that works well for small teams that prefer 
> simplicity (and want to avoid their developers spending too much time 
> customizing git ...)
>
> Fred Zimmerman
> Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
>
> *PageKicker <http://www.pagekicker.com/> -- real-time, customized, 
> mobile, social deep content
>
> Nimble Books LLC -- innovative, idiosyncratic independent publisher on 
> military, naval, and politics*
>
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) 
> <brendan.simon at etrix.com.au <mailto:brendan.simon at etrix.com.au>> wrote:
>
>     On 21/09/2015 7:54 pm, bazaar-request at lists.canonical.com
>     <mailto:bazaar-request at lists.canonical.com> wrote:
>>     ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>     Message: 1
>>     Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 18:34:54 -0700
>>     From: Kevin<m1ndstr3ngthapps at gmail.com> <mailto:m1ndstr3ngthapps at gmail.com>
>>     To:bazaar at lists.canonical.com <mailto:bazaar at lists.canonical.com>
>>     Subject: How can we ensure Bazaar (bzr) remains active?
>>     Message-ID:<55FF5EBE.6040906 at gmail.com> <mailto: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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