metronome mail for Bazaar 2.0 (or 1.18) - 6 August

[Jean-Francois Roy]

For what it's worth, I'll throw a +1 on that. Getting the core  
functionality, the "basic workflow", 100% kink-free is absolutely  
critical to adoption. I've witnessed it personally: if anything goes  
wrong within the first few days of usage, there's a good chance the  
person will drop Bazaar. This also includes a serious review of things  
like default behaviors and upgrading people to 2a (what good will it  
do if people don't upgrade?). Things like "Oh, you have to create a  
repository first to get good local branching performance, oh and you  
need to specify --format=1.14-rich-root (please don't ask what rich  
root is), oh and you may want --no-tree to be like Git, and oh you  
need to get this plug-in, which has this dependency and requires this  
number of settings to make this work great" are a burden on adoption.

May also want to consider the "batteries included" idea and make sure  
Bazaar comes well-equipped in terms of marketing points (yes, really).  
"Bazaar 2.0 has (yet another) better format!" isn't too "buzz-worthy".

Just my thoughts and humble opinion. I totally respect the huge amount  
of work and functionality that has gone into bzr since the 0.92 days.  
It's a fantastic tool (even more so with Launchpad, which should be  
advertised even more!).

Jean-Francois

On Jul 23, 2009, at 22:35, Andrew Cowie wrote:

> On Fri, 2009-07-24 at 13:31 +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
>> We won't slip this release, but depending on testing feedback we may
>> defer general recommendation of 2a until we're sure it's stable, in
>> which case this release will be called 1.18.
>
> That seems a very responsible approach.
>
> ++
>
> We're all hackers here, but it's easy to forget that calling something
> major.0 is a marketing statement, not a technical one. You're going to
> get a lot of attention when you release something called "2.0". I'm
> pretty sure that every one in the core Bazaar community knows that.
>
> Certainly making sure 2𝑛 is robust enough to stay as-is for ~2  
> years is
> important and you're on top of that, but *please* also try get in as
> much polish in as you can. There are UI glitches (lord nows there are
> many things that I personally find annoying about using bzr, and I'm
> like already converted, y'know?) *especially* as are encountered
> anywhere in the early-use - progress bar artifacts, incomprehensible
> error messages, inconsistencies between namespaces and aliases¹,  
> stack
> traces when you try to use bzr viz the first time... all that stuff
> makes Bazaar look unprofessional and belies the huge amount of work  
> that
> makes it an awesome tool inside.
>
> So just as you are willing to slip one release cycle for format
> stability, I encourage you to value getting the hundreds² of little,
> unsexy, but user-visible rough edges cleaned up. They're worth the  
> same
> slip. If you can, then it'll make 2.0 something that people _outside_
> our community will buzz about.
>
> ++
>
> Anyway, other than that plea, I want to compliment everyone on the
> steady evolution of bzr, and thank you for your efforts, whatever it  
> is
> you choose to work on. Bazaar certainly is a long way from where it  
> was
> at 0.7 when we started using it.
>
> AfC
> Sydney
>
> ¹ why does -r parent: not work? What does :parent mean? What's the
> difference?
>
> ² yes I picked that number out of the air, but I don't think it's  
> out of
> line; we have endless conversations about user interface and user
> experience glitches that lead to bug reports which are
> accepted/confirmed/whatever that then languish.
>