[Pkg-bazaar-maint] bzr (was: Re: Debian systemd survey)

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio]

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 11:31 PM, Jeremy Bicha <jbicha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On 22 May 2013 22:02, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair at debian.org> wrote:
>>> [...] Bazaar (which seems to have been abandoned by
>>> upstream with >2000 open bugs [1]) [...].
>>
>> On the other hand, it would be nice if you keep your FUD to the minimum. Bazaar
>> doesn't look abandoned[1], and >2000 open bugs is not uncommon. Nautilus and
>> Rhythmbox themselves have >1000 open bugs each.
>>
>> [1] https://code.launchpad.net/bzr
>
> Two commits this year? The only thing that makes it not completely
> abandoned by upstream is that occasionally there are a few maintenance
> bugfix commits done.

While I can't imagine anything good coming from discussing VCS choices
on debian-devel, I'll venture a reply...

I wouldn't say that bazaar is completely "dead," I just had a commit
merged this week. Though AFAICT, Canonical no longer employs anyone to
work on it directly, but it seems some number of bazaar hackers are
still employed in other positions there. I have no idea what their
long term plans are, but I'd imagine that Launchpad and Ubuntu will
continue to be consumers of bazaar for the foreseeable future. No one
has stepped up to drive development, and I do wish Canonical would
make some sort of official statement about their intentions.

There have been a number of interesting retrospectives from former
bazaar core developers, for those that are interested:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2012q4/075330.html
http://www.stationary-traveller.eu/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2013q1/075475.html

I've been the Debian maintainer for a number of bzr plugins for the
past few years, and I've recently picked up the maintenance of the bzr
package as well.

> For the record, I do use bzr (with
> http://jameswestby.net/bzr/builddeb/user_manual/merge.html ) in my
> normal Ubuntu/Debian packaging workflow. I haven't figured out how to
> git to work as nicely for that usecase yet.

I'd encourage anyone who cares about this workflow and these packages
to continue any further discussion of bazaar in Debian over on
pkg-bazaar-maint.

Thanks!

-- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio

   Ubuntu Developer <https://launchpad.net/~andrewsomething>
   Debian Developer <http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=asb>
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