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.
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
I’ve just finished watching the short film sponsored by the Blender Foundation, and I really have to say, it just feels better and better being in the open source world.
It’s an amazing production, both in the quality of the rendering, sound, and amazing idea behind it.
The official site is currently down due to heavy digging and such, but I happen to have the torrent link stored, so here’s a direct link to it, and, the embedded YouTube version (if you read through the planet, you might have to click to the post to watch it).
It’s licensed under Creative Commons, so besides being encouraged to share it, you can download all the original material used for it and all the tools, for free.
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.
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
I live in Argentina and currently work in a web development/Linux migration company oriented towards open source called Pentacorp, from where you can get in touch with me for any web development or Linux migration in Argentina you might need.
