Bazaar (software)

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Bazaar
Developed by Canonical Ltd. and community
Latest release 1.5 / May 16, 2008 (2008-05-16); 24 days ago
OS Cross-platform
Genre Distributed revision control system
License GNU General Public License
Website http://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 free and open source software projects. As of 2007, the best known user of Bazaar is the Ubuntu project.

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. Bazaar is free software and part of the GNU project.[1][2]

Contents

[edit] Features

Bazaar is designed for easy use. Its commands are quite similar to those found in CVS or SVN, and it is very simple to start and maintain a fresh project without a remote repository server.

In contrast to purely distributed version control systems which don't use a central server, Bazaar supports working with or without a central server. It is even possible to use both methods at the same time with the same project. The website Launchpad provides a free hosting service for projects managed with Bazaar.

Bazaar has support for working with some other revision control systems.[3] 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 with the bzr-svn plugin.[4] There is also beginnings of support for both Mercurial[5] and Git.[6] Currently these are not feature complete, but are complete enough to show a graphical history.

Bazaar supports files with names from the complete Unicode set. It also allows commit messages, committer names, etc. to be in Unicode.

Before the release of version 1.x, Bazaar used to be considerably slower than Git. Since then it has been catching up for some tasks.[7] Its performance is comparable to other revision control systems if network latency is the bottleneck.[8]

[edit] Users

Prominent projects that use Bazaar for version control include: GNU Mailman[9][10] and the GNOME bindings for Java[9][11]

[edit] History

[edit] Baz: an earlier Canonical Ltd version control system

The name "Bazaar" was originally used by a fork of the GNU arch client tla. This fork is now called Baz to distinguish it from the current Bazaar software.[12] Baz was announced in October 2004 by Canonical Ltd employee Robert Collins[13] and maintained until 2005, when the project then called Bazaar-NG (the present Bazaar) was announced as Baz's successor.[14] Baz is now unmaintained and Canonical considers it deprecated.[15][16] The last release of Baz was version 1.4.3, released October 2005.[17] A planned 1.5 release of Baz was abandoned in 2006.[18]

[edit] Bazaar

In February 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 by Canonical Ltd. and tasked with "build[ing] a distributed version-control system that open-source hackers will love to use."[19] A public website and mailing list were established in March 2005.[20][21]

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. Bazaar was originally intended as a test-bed for features to be integrated into Baz, but by mid-2005 many of the major Baz developers had begun working primarily on Bazaar directly.[16]

Version 1.0 of Bazaar was released in December 2007.[22] In February 2008, Bazaar became a GNU project.[1]

[edit] See also

Free software Portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Pool, Martin (2008-02-26). Bazaar is now a GNU project. bazaar-announce mailing list. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  2. ^ Pool, Martin (2008-05-21). Bazaar becomes a GNU project. info-gnu mailing list. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  3. ^ Vernooij, Jelmer; John Meinel, Olad Conradi, Martin Pool, Wouter Van Heyst, Aaron Bentley (2007-06-15). BzrForeignBranches. Retrieved on 2007-06-21.
  4. ^ Vernooij, Jelmer; Mark Lee, Neil Martinsen-Burrell, Robert Collins, Alexandre Vassalotti, Stijn Hoop (2007-06-07). BzrForeignBranches/Subversion. Retrieved on 2007-06-21.
  5. ^ The Bazaar Hg Plugin in Launchpad
  6. ^ bzr git support plugin in Launchpad
  7. ^ git/bzr historical performance comparison (2008-05-08). Retrieved on 2008-05-28.
  8. ^ Canonical Ltd. (2007-12-21). Benchmarks - Bazaar Version Control. Retrieved on 2008-01-20.
  9. ^ a b Projects using Bazaar. Canonical Ltd (2008-04-28). Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  10. ^ Mailman source code branches (2007-12-04). Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  11. ^ Operational Dynamics Pty Ltd. Get java-gnome!. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  12. ^ Pool, Martin; Matthieu Moy and Matthew Hannigan (2007-03-09). Branding. Retrieved on 2007-06-16.
  13. ^ Collins, Robert (2004-10-29). Announce: Bazaar. Gnu-arch-users mailing list. Retrieved on 2007-06-16.
  14. ^ Moy, Matthieu (2005-08-20). Future of GNU Arch, bazaar and bazaar-ng ... ?. bazaar-old mailing list. Retrieved on 2007-06-16.
  15. ^ Baz1x - Bazaar Version Control (2006-07-24). Retrieved on 2008-01-17.
  16. ^ a b Arbash Meinel, John (2006-07-26). HistoryOfBazaar. Retrieved on 2008-02-20.
  17. ^ Moy, Matthieu (2005-10-25). ReleaseNotes1.4.3. Retrieved on 2007-06-16.
  18. ^ Collins, Robert (2006-06-30). releasing 1.5. bazaar-old mailing list. Retrieved on 2007-06-16.
  19. ^ Pool, Martin (2005-02-01). sourcefrog: A beginning. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  20. ^ Pool, Martin (2005-03-23 mailinglist=bazaar). (test). mailing list. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.
  21. ^ Bentley, Aaron (2005-03-23). Re: State of the Arches. gnu-arch-users mailing list. Retrieved on 2008-05-23. “For completeness, it's probably worth mentioning that bazaar-ng (www.bazaar-ng.org) is another rcs system sponsored by Canonical”
  22. ^ Canonical Ltd (2007-12-14). "Canonical Releases Version 1.0 of Bazaar Version Control Tool for Efficient Developer Collaboration" (HTML) (in English). Press release. Retrieved on 2008-05-23.

[edit] External links