GNU Bazaar

GNU Bazaar (formerly Bazaar-NG, command line tool bzr) is a distributed and client–server revision control system sponsored by Canonical.

GNU Bazaar

Original author(s)	Martin Pool
Developer(s)	Canonical and community
Initial release	26 March 2005; 18 years ago (2005-03-26)^[1]
Final release	2.7.0^[2]  / 15 February 2016
Repository	code.launchpad.net/bzr
Written in	Python 2, Pyrex (optional), C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Successor	Breezy
Type	Distributed and Client–server revision control system
License	GPL-2.0-or-later^[3]
Website	bazaar.canonical.com

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 Microsoft Windows. Bazaar is free software and part of the GNU Project.^[4][5]

Features

Bazaar commands are similar to those found in CVS or Subversion. A new project can be started and maintained without a remote repository server by invoking bzr init in a directory which a person wishes to version.^[6]

In contrast to purely distributed version control systems which do not use a central server, Bazaar supports working with or without a central server.^{[clarification needed]} It is possible to use both methods at the same time with the same project. The websites Launchpad and SourceForge provide free hosting service for projects managed with Bazaar.

Bazaar has support for working with some other revision control systems.^[7] This allows users to branch from another system (such as Subversion^[8]), make local changes and commit them into a Bazaar branch, and then later merge them back into the other system. Read-only access is also available for Git^[9] and Mercurial.^[10] Bazaar also allows for interoperation with many other systems (including CVS, Darcs, Git, Perforce, Mercurial) by allowing one to import/export the history.^[11]

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

History

Baz: an earlier Canonical version control system

The name "Bazaar" was originally used by a fork of the GNU arch client tla. This fork is now^[update] called Baz to distinguish it from the current Bazaar software.^[12] Baz was announced in October 2004 by Canonical 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 declared 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]

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 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 and the first numbered pre-release, 0.0.1, was released on 26 March 2005.^[20][21][22]

Bazaar was conceived from the start as a different piece of software from both GNU arch and Baz. It has a different command set and is a completely different codebase and design. Bazaar was originally intended as a test-bed for features to be later integrated into Baz, but by mid-2005 many of the major Baz developers had begun working primarily on Bazaar directly and Baz was abandoned.^[16]

Version 1.0 of Bazaar was released in December 2007.^[23] In February 2008, Bazaar became a GNU Project.^[4] In April 2012 Martin Pool left Canonical^[24] and the pace of development of the project slowed.^[25] According to Jelmer Vernooij the members of Canonical's Bazaar team were assigned to different tasks in early 2012 and he himself stepped down from contributing to Bazaar at the end of 2012, after 7 years of contributing to the project.^[26] In March 2013 a discussion on the GNU Emacs mailing list started about whether Bazaar is still effectively maintained and if Emacs should move to another version control system.^[27] In January 2014 Eric Raymond proposed and coordinated a transition of GNU Emacs from Bazaar to the git version control system.^[28] This transition was completed in November 2014.^[29] Likewise, the Bugzilla project retired Bazaar in favor of git in March 2014 for multiple reasons, one of them being the impression that Bazaar was almost dead: "There are maybe 2-3 commits to trunk every month. The time to fix bugs in Bazaar also seems to be quite long, generally."^[30]

Version 2.7.0 was released in February 2016.^[31]

Breezy

Bazaar was forked as Breezy in 2017 to allow backwards-incompatible changes to be made, such as migrating from Python 2 to Python 3 and dropping support for older versions of Windows.^[32]

Adoption

Source code hosting

See also: Comparison of open source software hosting facilities

The following websites provide free source code hosting for Bazaar repositories:

• Launchpad
• GNU Savannah^[33]
• SourceForge (discontinued for new projects^[34])

Projects using Bazaar

Prominent projects that have used Bazaar for version control include:

• Armagetron Advanced^[35]
• Beautiful Soup^[36]
• Ubuntu^[37]

See also

•  Free and open-source software portal

• Breezy
• Distributed revision control
• Comparison of revision control software
• Comparison of open source software hosting facilities
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (source of the name)

References

1. "bzr 0.0.1 released".
2. "2.7.0 released". 15 February 2016. Retrieved 10 April 2016.
3. "What is Bazaar?". Bazaar is an official GNU project, licensed under the GPLv2 or later, at your option.
4. Pool, Martin (26 February 2008). "Bazaar is now a GNU project". bazaar-announce (Mailing list). Retrieved 23 May 2008.
5. Pool, Martin (21 May 2008). "Bazaar becomes a GNU project". info-gnu (Mailing list). Retrieved 23 May 2008.
6. bzr man page
7. Vernooij, Jelmer; John Meinel; Olad Conradi; Martin Pool; Wouter Van Heyst; Aaron Bentley (15 June 2007). . Archived from the original on 7 June 2007. Retrieved 21 June 2007.
8. Vernooij, Jelmer; Mark Lee; Neil Martinsen-Burrell; Robert Collins; Alexandre Vassalotti; Stijn Hoop (7 June 2007). "BzrForeignBranches/Subversion". from the original on 26 June 2007. Retrieved 21 June 2007.
9. bzr git support plugin in Launchpad
10. The Bazaar Hg Plugin in Launchpad
11. fastimport documentation
12. Pool, Martin; Matthieu Moy; Matthew Hannigan (9 March 2007). "Branding". from the original on 15 July 2007. Retrieved 16 June 2007.
13. Collins, Robert (29 October 2004). "Announce: Bazaar". Gnu-arch-users (Mailing list). Retrieved 16 June 2007.
14. Moy, Matthieu (20 August 2005). . bazaar-old (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 17 August 2014. Retrieved 16 June 2007.
15. "Baz1x - Bazaar Version Control". 24 July 2006. from the original on 7 January 2008. Retrieved 17 January 2008.
16. Arbash Meinel, John; Aaron Bentley; Martin Pool; Mark Shuttleworth (26 July 2006). "HistoryOfBazaar". Retrieved 20 February 2008.
17. Moy, Matthieu (25 October 2005). . Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. Retrieved 16 June 2007.
18. Collins, Robert (30 June 2006). . bazaar-old (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 12 May 2011. Retrieved 16 June 2007.
19. Pool, Martin (1 February 2005). "sourcefrog: A beginning". Archived from the original on 22 July 2012. Retrieved 23 May 2008.
20. Pool, Martin (23 March 2005). "(test)". bazaar (Mailing list). Retrieved 23 May 2008.
21. Bentley, Aaron (23 March 2005). "Re: State of the Arches". gnu-arch-users (Mailing list). Retrieved 23 May 2008. For completeness, it's probably worth mentioning that bazaar-ng (www.bazaar-ng.org) is another rcs system sponsored by Canonical
22. Pool, Martin (26 March 2005). "bzr 0.0.1 released". bazaar (Mailing list). Retrieved 12 June 2008.
23. (Press release). Canonical. 14 December 2007. Archived from the original on 12 May 2008. Retrieved 23 May 2008.
24. Pool, Martin (12 April 2012). "leaving Canonical". bazaar (Mailing list). Retrieved 9 December 2012.
25. Corbet, Jonathan (11 September 2012). "Bazaar on the slow track". LWN.net. Retrieved 14 November 2012.
26. Vernooij, Jelmer (19 December 2012). "Bazaar-NG: 7 years of hacking on a distributed version control system". Retrieved 21 December 2012.
27. "On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development". emacs-devel. 26 March 2013. Retrieved 30 March 2013.
28. "bzr is dying; Emacs needs to move". emacs-devel. 1 January 2014. Retrieved 10 January 2014.
29. "Emacs git conversion is done".
30. "Bugzilla:Migrating to git - MozillaWiki". 19 March 2014. Retrieved 20 April 2014.
31. Wilbur, Richard (15 February 2016). "2.7.0 released". Canonical. Retrieved 17 February 2016.
32. "Plans for Bazaar". lists.ubuntu.com. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
33. "WhyChooseSavannah". Savannah documentation. Retrieved 31 May 2022.
34. "SourceForge Support / Documentation / Bazaar".
35. "Armagetron Advanced Downloads". from the original on 16 November 2010. Retrieved 13 November 2010.
36. "Beautiful Soup website". Retrieved 26 October 2014.
37. "Ubuntu in Launchpad". Canonical. from the original on 10 October 2008. Retrieved 21 October 2008.

External links

• Official website