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The Bazaar project released their version 2.0.0 this week. I spoke to Martin Pool, the project’s lead, about the release and Bazaar generally.

Matthew: Congratulations on the release of Bazaar 2.0.0! If you had to come up with a headline for this release, what would it be?

Martin: “Harder, better, stronger, faster” — we made our new 2a format the default and it’s considerably smaller and faster. Ian‘s recent benchmarks show repositories in this format are substantially smaller than for Mercurial, and roughly the same size as for Git. Of course results do vary but it does correlate, and determines how much data we have to transfer from local disk or across the network.

The other cool thing about this release is that it’s the start of a stable series of 2.0.1 releases, where we’ll be landing only bugfixes and (as much as we can manage it) no new bugs or features, no API compatibility breaks, and no format changes. We’ve heard from users that in some situations they find our monthly releases too much, so we’re now going to give them the choice of a more stable series, or to keep getting new features every month with the 2.1betas.

Matthew: In the release announcement you mention that the new repository format is “substantially smaller and faster for many operations”. What in particular should I expect to notice as a Bazaar user?

Martin: The thing I actually notice most, living on the other side of the world from the Canonical (London) data centre is that pushes and pulls from Launchpad are dramatically faster — for some operations the dominant factor is the time it takes to open an ssh connection.

Matthew: Is it easy to get the new repository format up and running for my existing branches?

Martin: Yes, basically you just need to run upgrade — but you might like to read the Upgrade Guide first.

That reminds me of something else that changed recently — Ian converted our documentation to use Sphinx, so we get nicer HTML and also native Windows help files.

Matthew: The Bazaar community has done some really interesting work on repository formats. Is this new format the culmination of that or is there more you want to do?

Martin: I think there is more we could possibly do: for instance Alexander Belchenko, a user with some machines on older Windows releases, has the mantra that “OS locks must die” – we should rely on a smaller filesystem feature set, so that Bazaar works better there. Robert Collins has been sketching out a ‘dirstate2’ format for managing the working tree, that can be still smaller and faster.

But personally before we do a new public format release, I think we need to take a hard look at the user experience of a format change, especially when you have multiple developers. It is not nearly as seamless as we’d like. I think 2a gives us a good checkpoint that will work well for a while.

Matthew: What are you most excited about in this release?

Martin: I’m just thrilled it came together for such a good release, that 2a is performing so well, and that it’s into Karmic as a foundation for future stable releases.

Matthew: What makes Bazaar stand out right now from other version control systems?

Martin: I think it’d be that the transition to it can be much easier. Bazaar can be used in either a totally distributed or a centralized way, or any point in between, and that works in very well for people used to working on CVS or Subversion, or teams where some contributors are less technical. We aim to keep the user interface simple and the documentation clear, and every important feature can now be reached through the Explorer gui or through the command line. Also, Bazaar can directly interact with projects in svn, git or hg through foreign-branch plugins, so people can gradually transition.

Matthew: What advice would you offer to a project considering switching to Bazaar from another VCS?

Martin: Don’t hesitate to talk to us on IRC or the lists about how you’re planning to use it or any questions about the transition.

Matthew: What’s your favourite Bazaar plugin?

Martin: Probably bzr-explorer and qbzr, they’re coming along very quickly as a complete graphical interface.

Matthew: What’s next for Bazaar?

Martin: For the next while we’re going to especially focus on helping Ubuntu switch to bzr-based distributed development.

Matthew: Thanks Martin!

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Bazaar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.