Bazaar 1.0 released | Comments (5)
Posted in Code, Software on 17th December 2007, 11:10 am by Stuart
Fantastic news that Bazaar has reached version 1.0. This is thanks to a lot of hard work by some very talented people and I’m pleased to note that it looks like case sensitivity issues have been addressed.
Amongst the changes are improved documentation. Docs are something that are often overlooked but the recent improvements to the documentation over the last few months are really noticeable. Pack 0.92 repository format is now the default. This format is safer, more robust and faster. The good news is that existing branches can be easily upgraded to the new format by running a couple of commands. bzr reconcile and then bzr upgrade. See the full release notes for more info.
If you haven’t looked at Bazaar yet, and are still suffering working with SVN or CVS, be sure to download it from bazaar-vcs.org and and take it for a spin. There’s no substitute for trying it out firsthand.
From your perspective, what’s the advantage in using bzr rather than svn? People keep saying “it’s better”, but because I haven’t tried it much I haven’t formed an opinion; what do you think is better about it? I already have a public svn server, so I don’t have to suffer the pain of setting that up.
@sil: For me the main points are:
Superior branching and merging - De-centralisation means that branching and merging have to be really first-clas. If say you have some code I will branch it, hack on it and then make it available for you to merge. If merging wasn’t capable then the whole thing would be capable. Also not needing the central server makes the whole process much more straight-forward especially as you wouldn’t need to give me commit rights on your server for example.
Renaming is not just an alias for remove and add. Renames are tracked so that subsequent merges involving files that have been renamed are seamless. As I understand it this functionality will be added to SVN in 1.5
Using it anywhere is easy as it’s all just files. I can create a repo really easily and shove it up on a webserver to make that branch available to anyone. I can install bazaar on a webserver and version /etc for example to track configurations.
The flexibility it gives means you can pretty much adapt it to any situation/dev environment which provides a neat way of side-stepping environment limitations.
Lastly as it’s written in Python it’s so readily pluggable. Though SVN’s maturity means that the language bindings do give similar levels of extensibility and beyond.
John Arbash Meinel has written a nice comparison that certainly comes across as objective even though he’s heavily involved in working with Bazaar http://jam-bazaar.blogspot.com/2007/10/bazaar-vs-subversion.html
Is there a GUI. That is my number one reason for using SVN - I can use Tortoise. I’m a web designer, not a programmer - I want GUI, not CLI.
@Matt: That’s fair enough however there’s also TortoiseBzr
Ah, brilliant! A little bit beta at the moment, but this is exactly the sort of tool that I would need.
Thanks Stuart, I’ll be keeping my eye on this.