What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Ian Clatworthy]

Ben Finney wrote:
> Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:
> 
>> Canonical's desired focus for Bazaar development in the next six-month
>> period is on things that help Ubuntu developers, in particular in
>> helping them to get better interaction with upstreams and to ship
>> fixes faster.
> 
> Is it too optimistic of me to read this as saying “smoother and
> more-transparent interaction with existing repositories using other
> VCSen like Git, Mercurial, and Darcs” being a priority for Canonical
> resources into Bazaar?

I think that's an implicit outcome, yes.

>> There is a desire to position Bazaar more as "a Canonical open source
>> product" rather than "an open source project supported by Canonical" -
>> thus the request for the web site name change. I'm not sure if that's
>> the right way to describe the change in approach - it's close, though,
>> and I'm trying to work out just precisely what it is.
> 
> I reiterate that this will further entrench a very negative impression
> Bazaar has with many people: that Bazaar is a VCS tied to a particular
> corporation, and communities would be better advices to choose a VCS
> with a more independent focus, like Git or Mercurial.
> 
> I had hoped that Canonical, and the Bazaar core developers, would not
> want that impression to increase; but this makes me suspect that
> impression may be right.

I really, *really* struggle with this FUD. Canonical is sponsoring
Bazaar because we believe it has an important part to play in making
open source development - and therefore Ubuntu development - much more
efficient. Good tools don't exist in a vacuum - they exist to solve hard
problems. The more demanding the problem, the better the tool needs to
be. Shipping an OS as advanced as Ubuntu every six months is a very
tough problem. If Bazaar can continue to play a critical role in that
challenge, then I'm sure it will more than satisfy the needs of most
projects, open source or commercial, distributed or co-located.

If you need to debate Bazaar's "independence" (whatever that means) with
others, stick to our track record. We have done a *huge* amount of work
lately to make Bazaar a great product for everyone, regardless of their
platform. From installers to migration tools to documentation to GUI
tools to daily cross-platform testing, Bazaar is continuing to move
forward in leaps and bounds, day after day, month after month, on all
major platforms. Ubuntu is our biggest customer but we're hardly
Ubuntu-centric. A large percentage of our customers run on Windows and
do so because we're the best choice for them.

Taking some time to focus on our most important customer is good:

* Git got better by being a good tool for kernel developers.
* Mercurial got better by being a good tool for developers working on
  Sun projects.

Likewise, Bazaar will benefit a lot from listening and assisting Ubuntu
developers. Most likely, everyone in the Bazaar community will
benefit in one way or another. I'd be very surprised otherwise.

Of course, working on one set of problems means other things will get
less attention in the short term. For example, we were originally
planning to spend a lot of time in 2.1 on user interface improvements
and some of those changes will now most likely be delayed. FWIW, Bazaar
Explorer now exists (and didn't when we initially planned the UI focus
in 2.1) so "UI" ended up getting some love earlier than initially
expected. There's more work to do here but it's not our top issue right now.

Ian C.