From looking at my development directories, it appears that it was in early 2008 that I moved my personal source code control system from CVS to Bazaar. (Before that I’d used RCS and even SCCS) I learned about Bazaar from a coworker, John. It was Python-based, the system used by Canonical for Ubuntu and I found it to work extremely well. Since then, for seven years now, I’ve used it for my personal version management and also as a shadow version control system at work.

It has been extremely stable for me, fast, and I can’t think of any trouble I’ve ever had with Bazaar. However, lately I’ve seen indications that Bazaar is no longer maintained and may be declining as a version control choice. Maybe it was never that popular.

Lately, Git seems to be the version control system of choice and it is the system I use every day for work. I’m wondering if I should start using it for my personal work. The command set and, as they say, “the workflow” is different. It’s not friendly to large binary blobs. That’s probably okay.

I already like it less because, if I want to make a branch of a particular version or another branch to work on, there needs to be a root branch of sorts, a hub to clone the other branch from. With Bazaar you can just branch any branch, merge changes from it, etc. So now I’ll have to make some local hub to clone, push and pull from. Yech. That seems so archaic now.

However, I found this blog post by Jelmer Vernooij who was a primary developer of Bazaar. He basically tells the complete history and also how it’s finally been abandoned for the most part. So, I guess I should start moving on to git.

I won’t even try to convert over my current bzr projects. There is Mercurial which may be worth a look. Ah well.

Contributions from people outside of the Canonical Bazaar team had become rare by mid-2011. In early 2012 the members of the Canonical Bazaar team were assigned to other projects, though we would still fix the occasional bug in Bazaar. Martin left Canonical in April 2012.

During my spare time in the first 6 months of 2012 I tried to finish my remaining in-progress branches. After that, I thought I would see how it would go.

I think it’s time to move on. There are still some things I don’t like about it, but Git is a decent source code management system. Bazaar isn’t going anywhere; no doubt there will be users for a few years to come, and people contributing fixes, but it hasn’t been adopted to the level I was hoping.

Bazaar-NG: 7 years of hacking on a distributed version control system