How can we ensure Bazaar (bzr) remains active?

[Sebastien Alaiwan]

On 2015-09-21 03:34, Kevin wrote:
> I'm a professional software engineer and have been using Mercurial (|hg|) DVCS for about a year. I've tried Git but I did not like it, Mercurial was much more user-friendly. These two SCM projects are very active; lots of contributors committing often to trunk. I just recently discovered Bazaar (|bzr|) and I have found it to be the very best, user-friendly, intuitive DVCS; more than any other. 
It is.
I'm also a professional software engineer. I use Bazaar on a daily basis at work/home.

> Sadly, the latest stable release is over 2 years old, and the latest stable Windows release is over 3 years old! :-( This detracts potential users from using bzr, thinking that it must be not well supported; or that it is not as popular as git and hg because it is somehow "not as good".
>
Bazaar is better than git on practically every point, except four, by importance:

a) submodules/externals: nesting projects is becoming more and more popular, and Bazaar has no support for them. Nested trees are still not available. And the bzr-externals plugins is only close-to-usable.
it's a pity, because git submodule support works, but is painfully slow (the whole external git repository must be downloaded, even if you only need one precise revision).
b) support for other repository types: the 'bzr-git' plugin and 'bzr-svn' plugin (allowing r/w access to git/svn repos) have been removed from Debian testing.
c) rebasing: it's common practise, in community-based software development, when you send pull requests, to have a clean history. The bzr-rewrite plugin seems to do the job quite well, why not integrate it?
d) speed: git is incredibly fast. Not a dealbreaker, though, as Bazaar is fast enough.

> Please let me know anything else I can do to help. I want the Bazaar DVCS to be more active, I think it's a great software tool! :-) 
1) Spread the word. If you're a professional software engineer, tell others about Bazaar at work. All my team projects are now using Bazaar.
I think the vast majority of people using git and "loving it" directly came from Subversion.
A lot of software teams are still using Subversion, and they need to be shown how to switch to Bazaar before any brain-damaging exposure to git.
(The first killer Bazaar feature to show to your still-using-subversion teammates is the "bzr shelve" command)

2) I'm also a Launchpad user. But github is way more popular. At the moment, all github users are git users.
Bazaar needs a strongly and reliable git repository support. This way, github users will have an opportunity to realize that Bazaar might be a better git client than git :-)

> We cannot (and should not) allow such an awesome DVCS to fall into a state of being unused, ignored, and eventually abandoned. Rather, let's improve it, spread it, and use it!
>
Amen brother.


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