bzr in brazil
I haven't posted here for a long time, which is bad. It's funny how many people got through phases of just not wanting or getting around to blogging.
bzr (aka bazaar-ng) is coming along pretty well. We just passed 1000 commits onto the mainline since it started self-hosting in March of this year, and we're regularly pulling in changes from contributors branches using bzr.
The emphasis has changed a lot since I started. At the time it was meant to be a research prototype to explore ideas to move back into systems based on GNU Arch. Since then, bitkeeper has exploded, and many people have started picking up the pieces, and the original schedule looks rather leisurely in retrospect.
One important consequence is that we're trying to get bzr to a finished state in its own right.
The core versioning/branching functionality is there and working: branch, push, pull, merge, status, diff, add, commit etc. Some are rather nicely polished; some less so.
I'm trying to define some specific goals for the next few months, and focus on getting them done. Near the top of the list are more compact storage and smarter mesh merging.
One outcome of the research side is modules to do the fundamental vc algorithms of 3-way merge and weave in pure Python. A few people have suggested that merge3 in particular might usefully be contributed back into the Python standard library; after a bit more maturation I'll look into that. These have practical use in allowing it to be installed and run without any extra dependencies like GNU diff; this is moderately important on windows.
I've been in Brazil for the last couple of weeks with other folks from Canonical.com, mostly doing architecture-ish work on Launchpad, our application set for building and supporting a free software distribution. Not so much bzr hacking for now.
Perhaps the most immediately interesting of these is Rosetta, a web-based software translation system that already used by a thousand translators. (If you consider the pool of people who are fluent in at least two languages and work on translating free numbers then a thousand is a pretty large number.)
There are some other good concepts in there — a bug tracker that really deeply understands the way code (and bugs) spread across different free software distributions and packages. They're going to need some UI love before it's easy to understand what's happening inside, but I think that will happen.
The other very cool thing is getting to spend time with Mark and other bright people here.
posted Wed 3 Aug 2005 in /software/vc/bzr | link
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