I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Bazaar Sprint back in March, mostly thanks to Canonical sponsoring my entire trip across the globe
The sprint was interesting in all sorts of ways, and it got me working on several projects (some of which I’ll talk about in future posts), but there was one in particular that amazed me how fast it was put together. Bzr-upload.
It all started one night, while sitting across the table from Vincent Ladeuil, the guy who basically wrote transports in Bazaar, and I started complaining about how I had to work around bazaar to make it fit into my daily work flow (doing web development).
The problem was simple: bzr doesn’t update the working tree (the actual files) remotely, so there was no simple way for me to upload the websites I worked on a daily basis.

Long story short, Vincent asked some questions, sat down, wrote tests, wrote code to work with those tests (TDD, FTW), and after some fiddling, we can now upload websites (and anything else, actually) using bzr’s knowledge of what we’ve changed, and it’s solid transport libraries (ftp, sftp).

So… how does this work? Simple.
Assuming you already have bzr installed, fire up a terminal and do:
bzr checkout lp:bzr-upload ~/.bazaar/plugins/upload

Now that we have the plugin installed, go to the branch containing your website, and with a simple:
beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr upload sftp://beuno@host/path/to/http
No uploaded revision id found, switching to full upload
Uploading bar
Uploading foo

Done!

Did more work?

beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr ci -m'Random bug fix'
Committing to: /mywebsite/
modified foo
Committed revision 2.
beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr upload
Using saved location: sftp://beuno@host/path/to/http
Uploading foo

That’s it!

bzr-upload will remember the last revision you uploaded, and make sure it only sends what you’ve changed.

Project’s page: https://launchpad.net/bzr-upload

Comments, feedback, patches, etc are very welcome.

This just in, MySQL has migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. They also seem to be using Launchpad quite extensively, and have already updated their installation from source instructions.
Not only is it a big user base for Bazaar, but yet another move from Closed Source to Open Source software.

Congratulations to all the Canonical folks to helped with the move (I hear John and Elliot had a lot to do with it in particular), and welcome MySQLers

The 1.4 release of Bazaar includes handy improvements to the speed of log and status, new options for several commands, improved documentation, and better hooks, including initial code for server-side hooks. A number of bugs have been fixed, particularly in interoperability between different formats or different releases of Bazaar over there network. There’s been substantial internal work in both the repository and network code to enable new features and faster performance.

You can check out the full changelog at: https://launchpad.net/bzr/1.4/1.4/
And download it at the usual location: http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download

I’ve just kicked off a wiki page to follow up on the state of Integration into IDEs, so, if you want a specific IDE worked on, or are currently working on an integration, please feel free (or encouraged even) to add it to the wiki page: http://bazaar-vcs.org/IDEIntegration

I hope that page eventually harbours enough information for any random person to land on it and find out if their favourite IDE currently works with bazaar, or enough information to start working on one.

malbisetti@pentaserv:~/red_teatral$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
292 bzr
51 cd
29 tail
25 ls
24 exit
17 screen
15 su
9 vim
6 rm
6 cat

Right, I might be using bzr a bit too much… 

Just a quick note for everyone who is wondering, bazaar hosting on Launchpad is horrifyingly slow this weekend, so, “it’s not just you”.

Seems the devs are working on it, and part of the problem has been fixed, but it’s still not there yet.

Good thing it’s a distributed version control system, huh?

It occurred to me that many people couldn’t attend the last bzr sprint, and having missed out on other conferences myself, I know how discouraging it can be left out of the action  

Anyway, a great wiki page was setup with everything that was discussed, and who’s going to work on what, so feel free to sign up yourself to the bits you are interested, and get in touch with the rest of the folks to coordinate efforts.

So, the sprint is over.
It’s been a very long week, and looking back at it it seems impossible to me that so many things happened and got done in just 5 days.
This has been the first bazaar sprint I’ve attended, so my expectations weren’t based on anything else than my imagination.
Basically, I thought I would meet very intelligent people who had a a tons of experience with the project, and that knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it.
It wasn’t quite like that.
There where 16 of us in total, which is a pretty large crowd for such a specific piece of software like versioning control, and everyone was just embarrassingly smart. What was a surprise was how well us community folks where integrated into the project as a whole, on the decision making aspects and on even on taking responsibility for ideas being put in place appropriately. Everyone was extremely helpful with just about anything, and I’ve personally learned so much in such a small time frame, I can’t even begin to process it.

Canonical sponsored all our travel and accommodation costs, to the extent that it didn’t cost me a single dollar to go across half the world and spend some time discussing, coding, and drinking beer with the same people I hang out on IRC. The four start hotel overlooking the Thames was a bit over the top, but, as you can expect, we didn’t complain. I also got to meet people from Launchpad and Ubuntu with whom I’ve been interacting for the past two years. Many concepts one has over what’s commonly denominated “low bandwidth communication” (eg. IRC or email) change a fair bit with some face to face time.
While really tired, I’m really happy with how everything went, and am really excited to start work (and finish!) on some of the many areas I volunteered in.

I suppose this is just a way of thanking everyone for making it possible, and for the hospitality which we where treated with.

beuno@beuno-laptop:~$ bzr rocks

P.S. I’m going to catch up on all the previous days of the sprint, just need some sleep 

Just over a week ago, Bazaar got approved as an official GNU project, and it seems some big GNU projects like emacs are thinking about converting to bzr.

Exciting times to be working on bzr!

A while ago Matthew Revell interviewed me on the work being done on IDE integration efforts, and posted it on the Launchpad blog.

Direct download link