| Canonical releases Version 1.0 of 'Bazaar' version control tool |
Dec. 13, 2007
Open-source projects often face the problem of keeping track of a project's code, while avoiding stifling developers' creativity. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, claims it has a solution to that problem: Bazaar 1.0, its new version control system.
Unlike most VCSs (version control systems), Bazaar is a distributed, rather than centralized, system. This may sound like a recipe for a VCS that wouldn't work well. Despite this, in a statement Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical CEO and Ubuntu's founder, said that "Bazaar is designed for global teams of collaborating developers."
Shuttleworth explained, "A large open-source project like Ubuntu requires an extremely intuitive, robust and flexible version control system to accommodate hundreds of people working on shared code. But distributed software engineering is not limited to the open-source world: corporate and proprietary software development is increasingly done by teams that span companies, continents and time-zones and need the ability to manage their work in an efficient distributed fashion."
According to Canonical, a centralized VCS may work fine for proprietary, tightly controlled projects, but it doesn't work well for open-source or outsourced projects where programmers are often scattered across the globe. The company also claims that "Bazaar has been used successfully by commercial projects with hundreds of developers spanning multiple continents."
As for its specific advantages, Canonical claims that it's easy to use both directly, using either a command line or graphical user interface, or when integrated with other programmer tools like Eclipse. Bazaar, which is Python-based, is also extensible. The program comes with more than 20 Bazaar plug-ins. These use a Python API (application program interface) for easy developer tool integration. The program is designed to be easy for users of the CVS (Concurrent Versions System) and Subversion VCS programs.
In addition, the program is simple to deploy. It doesn't require a dedicated server. Any Web server that includes ftp will work as a Bazaar server. Canonical also states that because developers can commit their code locally whenever they want, they're less dependent on the central code base. Thus, "Bazaar encourages development of features and fixes in independent branches which can be merged into the main line of development at any time."
In a Linux-Watch interview, Shuttleworth explained that by making it easier to work in independent branches, which can then be easily adopted into the main code tree, Bazaar encourages developers to explore new ideas within a project rather than forking their new idea into another, related open-source project. This, in turn, "lets new developers start contributing immediately and working on new ideas even when they can't get buy-in with old guard." Thus, "this discourages forks and helps with the social conflicts between new and older project developers. It makes it easier for people to learn, work and have fun together on a project."
Shuttleworth added, "I'm fascinated by how we empower talent to find the interesting problem and work on it from everywhere. So, Bazaar really helps a big project like Ubuntu, by letting us get good ideas upstream as soon as possible."
The South-African-born millionaire also noted that Bazaar can be used for more than just code. "It can be used for all kinds of content. Since it's very embeddable, it can be used as the storage engine for CMS [content management systems] Wikis, or graphical tools."
Bazaar is available both under a GPL and a proprietary license. With the latter, Bazaar can be integrated into third-party commercial products. Because it's built on Python, administrators can run it on any operating system, such as Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, that supports Python 2.4 or above. Open-source developers can also run public Bazaar branches on Launchpad, Canonical's code hosting service. The program can also, of course, be downloaded from the Bazaar Web site.
--Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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