What is the state of Bazaar version control?

Question

I am looking to start a project with distributed source control and am evaluating the different options. Looking at Bazaar, I stumbled over several articles (e.g. this) that development has slowed down significantly.

What is the status of the project bazaar? Are bugs getting fixed?

Steinke

This sort of question would be better asked on the bzr mailing list. – Trysail

@Trysail That is unlikely to produce a very objective answer... – Steinke

@ArikRaffaelFunke If you have an answer from askubuntu.com, please post it here, this is an interesting topic ! – Dollydolman

Did you end up choosing to use Bazaar? – Edwinaedwine

@Arik, so what did you choose ? Any update on this topic ? – Dollydolman

Answer 1

I will try to Answer first with facts.

1/ According to the Active (published) Bazaar branches of Bazaar, we can see that there is 8 active development branches (changed since beginning of 2013)

2/ According to Bazaar 2.6b3 milestone, 3 bugs out of 12 are fixed for the next 2.6b3 release. This version started 6 month ago (August 2012).

3/ According to Bazaar v2.5 series, v2.5 series had a beta/minor release every month.

4/ According to Bazaar v2.6 series, v2.6 series has a beta/minor release every 4 months (well, there are not so many releases to give trends here).

5/ Bazaar is still used on prestigious/ambitious/large projects : Ubuntu, Debian,  MySql , Launchpad ... projects that are active in the Bazaar community.

So the first observation is that releases are less frequent, clearly.
One may think it's bad trends, but one can consider that the application is now mature enough and that new road map (with new features) needs to be forecast.

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To finish, here is an extract of a IRC chat I had with bzr team. This may point out the issue with intermediate release.

trident_job: Hi there. I've seen that latest bzr version is v2.6.2 and is 1 year ago (nearly).
trident_job: next version v2.6.3 still have 3 bugs to fix ... do you think the project is stall ?

mmm: we lack anyone who's job it is to do the release these days
mmm: you're right that there's stuff on trunk that could have done with being released a good while ago

trident_job: mmm: yeah, that's not good advertisement for an open source project to have 1 year release cycle

mmm: well poked... so, probably an rt unfortunately

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UPDATE 2013.09.20 : Bazaar retrospective from a dev. Read especially the last two chapters :

• Bazaar on the slow track
• Conclusion

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Dollydolman

Thanks. From when is the IRC log approximately? I am going to assume it is quite recent. - Regarding the state of Bazaar: Am I right to understand that the take-home message from your answer is: Bazaar has stabilised and works well. Abandonment is unlikely as a few high-profile projects are using it. BUT currently it is severly understaffed and progress and maintenance is minimal? – Steinke

This IRC log is 3 weeks old. To my mind, Bazaar is stable enough (I'm using it daily both personally and professionally). Abandonment is surely unlikely, even if Bazaar is less common than GIT or Mercurial, it is a really serious and strong alternative (depending on your needs, features ...). I would summarize by saying Bazaar is is a slow curve by now, this may be quite common on open source development !?! – Dollydolman

Great answer thanks - though I believe I am missing some cultural background to understand what you mean by "slow curve". Though from context I get the message of your answer. – Steinke

UPDATE 2013.09.20 : Bazaar retrospective from a dev. – Dollydolman

Very nice fact sheet :-) – Adamec

Also very interesting are the commits by month: openhub.net/p/bazaar/commits/summary – Deckhand

@TridenT, What does "probably an rt" mean? – Biodynamics

Last update (read it to understand) : answers.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/265002 – Dollydolman