The Bazaar version control system <http://bazaar-vcs.org/> recently became a GNU project. We set out several years ago to build a version control system that would suit the collaboration and cooperation at the heart of free software, and Bazaar is the result of that effort.
Our goal has been to make distributed version control easy to use across all platforms. Bazaar features a simple and friendly interface, so that new users will find it familiar and natural. The key operations for distributed version control are branching and merging, so much of Bazaar's design is to make sure that you can branch and merge efficiently between individuals and teams, using local or remote branches. For developers, there is an extension API and plugin suite that enable you to extend Bazaar, and bzrlib makes it easy to embed Bazaar functionality into your own GPL applications. Bazaar is still under very active development. There is a culture of code reviews and test driven development in the Bazaar core team, so you can quite easily expect to be able to contribute code to the core of Bazaar. The focus of our current work on Bazaar is network efficiency, so we encourage folks to help us optimise the smart server protocol for collaboration from all corners of the globe. Another goal in the design of Bazaar is to make it straightforward to interoperate with projects that are using a different VCS. We know different projects will choose the tools that suit them, but we wanted to make it possible for someone to use Bazaar to participate in any project. So Bazaar can represent the version control operations of every other VCS, and there are plugins that let you read version history for a project into Bazaar from Subversion, Git, CVS and other projects. It is possible to keep the "trunk" of project development on, say, Subversion, and run a continuous "import" of that trunk into Bazaar from which developers can branch and merge. Such an import has already been setup for Emacs and a few other projects - Canonical runs more than 1,000 of them constantly at Launchpad.net (see https://code.launchpad.net/+project-cloud for a list of projects that have registered Bazaar branches there). The code that does the Launchpad imports is all published under the GPL if you want to do it yourself. We're happy to help with, or offer advice on, conversion of your project from any other system. Speak to us in #bzr on Freenode, or write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can host Bazaar branches on almost any server where you have read and write access over SFTP, FTP or HTTP, or over SSH with the bzr smart server. We would like to have first-class support on Savannah, and are seeking someone experienced with PHP and Perl and the Savane codebase to help with this. -- Martin for the Bazaar developers _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu@gnu.org> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu
