Bazaar (software)

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Bazaar

Developer:	Canonical Ltd. and community
Latest release:	0.15 / 2 April 2007
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Distributed revision control system
License:	GNU General Public License
Website:	http://www.bazaar-vcs.org/

Bazaar (formerly Bazaar-NG) is a distributed revision control system sponsored by Canonical Ltd., designed to make it easier for anyone to contribute to open source software projects.

The development team's focus is on ease of use, accuracy and flexibility. Branching and merging upstream code is designed to be very easy, with focus on users being productive with just a few commands. Bazaar can be used by a single developer working on multiple branches of local content, or by teams collaborating across a network.

Bazaar is written in the Python programming language, with packages for major Linux distributions, Mac OS X and Windows. Released under the GNU General Public License, Bazaar is free software.

As of 2007, the best known users of Bazaar are the Ubuntu and Drupal projects.

1 Features
2 History
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Features

Decentralized: Bazaar is decentralized and allows for greater flexibility for the programmer.
Simple: Bazaar allows users to modify the current branch by using normal file-system commands. Users can be productive in Bazaar with very few commands.
Smart: Bazaar has a very intelligent merge system and reduces conflicts between branches in the case of complicated merges between teams of programmers working on related code.
Unicode support: Bazaar supports files with names from the complete Unicode set. It also allows commit messages, committer names, etc to be in Unicode.

Bazaar has support for working with some other revision control systems.^[1] This allows users to branch from another system (such as Subversion), make local changes and commit them into a Bazaar branch, and then later merge them back into the other system. Bazaar has basic support for Subversion^[2] with the bzr-svn plugin.^[3] There is also beginnings of support for both Mercurial^[4] and Git^[5]. Currently these are not feature complete, but are complete enough to show a graphical history.

[edit] History

On February 1, 2005, Martin Pool, a developer who had previously described and reviewed a number of revision control systems in talks and in his weblog, announced that he had been hired into Canonical Ltd. and tasked with "build[ing] a distributed version-control system that open-source hackers will love to use."^[6] A public website and mailing list were established in March of 2005.

This project was conceived as a fresh implementation, designed to be distributed and building on the best ideas from a variety of other open source revision control systems under development at the time, without some of their historical decisions. The project initially ran in parallel to Canonical Ltd's work on a version of GNU Arch called Baz. To try to reduce confusion and conflicts the new project was originally called Bazaar-NG and its command was called "bzr", changed from the original Bazaar's "baz". It is now just known as Bazaar.^[7]