What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Karl Fogel]

Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:
> 2009/11/12 Karl Fogel <karl.fogel at canonical.com>:
>> Second, open sourcing stuff *is* hard and takes a long time to finish.
>> Try it.  I spent most of my first six or seven months at Canonical
>> working on the open sourcing of Launchpad; for the final few months
>> before the release it was really 100% or more of my time, and I *still*
>> didn't get to every loose end that I wanted to.  There are all sorts of
>> issues with code layout, with weird licensing obligations that only take
>> effect once you start distributing code, with unanticipated license
>> interactions, technical issues of making the code ready for newcomers to
>> build... And it wasn't just me dealing with this stuff, it was many
>> other people on Canonical's Launchpad development team.  It cost us
>> serious time: bugs unfixed, features slowed down.  I won't bore you with
>> the details, but if you want them, they're there.
>
> Thanks - both for getting it released, and for explaining it.

Heh, didn't mean to guilt trip you!

It's very much a tip-of-the-iceberg situation.  It was easy for people
to look at Launchpad and say "What's the big deal?  Just slap a license
on it and open up the repository."  I think zooko may not have been
aware of how much more involved the process was.

By the way, I saw the upcoming Emacs conversion referenced in this
thread.  For those wondering where that stands: we're pretty close, it's
just a matter of selecting which of several conversions to test, and
testing it.  Current status is this message:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-11/msg00306.html

and http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-11/msg00309.html
has a followup from Andreas Schwab.  See also our general checklist at
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/EmacsBzrSwitchover.

Anyone here who has Bzr expertise and wants to inspect those conversions
for problems, please do.

-Karl