BAZAAR (SOFTWARE)

'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. As of 2007, the best known users 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. Released under the GNU General Public License, Bazaar is free software.

Contents

Features

History

See also

References

External links

Features

Bazaar uses a decentralized system to avoid creating system bottlenecks or dividing contributors into camps based upon access privilege.
Bazaar is designed to be easy to use: it supports regular filesystem commands to modify a programming "branch."
Bazaar is designed to handle merges between similar "branches" of code, and to avoid conflicts between related pieces of code written by separate programmers.
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 with the ''bzr-svn'' plugin.^[2] There is also beginnings of support for both Mercurial^[3] and Git^[4]. Currently these are not feature complete, but are complete enough to show a graphical history.

History

On 1 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 into Canonical Ltd. and tasked with "build[ing] a distributed version-control system that open-source hackers will love to use."^[5] A public website and mailing list were established in March 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.^[6]

See also

★ Comparison of revision control software

References

1. BzrForeignBranches
2. BzrForeignBranches/Subversion
3. https://launchpad.net/products/bzr-hg
4. https://launchpad.net/products/bzr-git
5. http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/personal/at-canonical.html
6. http://bazaar-vcs.org/HistoryOfBazaar

External links

★ Bazaar website