After `OpenBSD failed the five minute test`_, can Bazaar be usable within 5 minutes?

Backup upon Backup

I have been writing my latest little Python program and it has accidentally become not so little. So I have been backing the directory up before making changes each little coding session. Now I have 15 or so old directories, and if I need to go back and see what I have done, and at some point I will, then it would be a little dull to try to grep my way through them.

So I decided to use a source control management system. I strongly dislike CVS and Subversion, for reasons I can explain another time, and for another project I have been using hg (also known as Mercurial), so I was just going to use that. This time, however, I decided to use Bazaar, not least because if I ever get the code to a point where I am willing to share it, then I will probably upload it to my launchpad.net thingie, as I find Sourceforge pretty horrible to use.

My two minutes with Baz

To install programs is a bit operating system specific of course, but on Gentoo Linux you just have to type:

emerge bzr

Note, that confusingly enough, it is not the package 'bazaar' - that is an old deprecated program that does not share code and has a different set of features. That tripped me up as I was using the wrong program to start with. Hopefully the Gentoo maintainer who I ran into will make it more clear. So that used up the first two minutes.

Fortunately, the correct Bazaar is so user friendly that I easily did the rest in three minutes. I subsequently learned that Bazaar folks call the new one bzr and the old one baz. Both programs were written by the same people, they seem to have simply downed tools on the old one then wrote the new one. There seems to be no good reason to use the unmaintained old one, and many good reasons to use the new one. Anyway, enough of this, lets move on.

My Three Minutes with Bzr

So I followed the relevant bits of the handy tutorial. Firstly I set up my name and email address. Which I have cunningly obfuscated so I get less spam (my email address is easy to figure out if you are a real human).

bzr whoami 'Command Line < warrior@localhost.com >'

Then I went to my folder with my code in and blessed it with holy penguin pee:

bzr init

This made a folder called .bzr which will contain the history and other control data. You are meant to ignore it and leave this alone. Then I could run:

bzr status

This showed all my files as 'ignored', since none are currently being watched by bazaar. Next I did:

bzr add *.py

So at this point, all of my Python files are being watched by the system, and all other file types are unknown. Cleverly, it automatically ignored all the compiled Python bytecode files (.pyc) which I would never want to track.

So the manual says "There are three classes of file: unknown, ignored, and versioned". My Python source files are 'versioned' (yes they make up words!), while my compiled python files are ignored and my other files are unknown to the system.

Next up I added another file, and was ready to make my first commit. I used -m to add a message:

bzr commit -m "added my initial files"

That's all there is to it really, (I am sure there are lots of other features I do not need). A rather nice thing is that you can use normal filesystem commands without messing up the system and no need for some horrid database. If I want to stop Bazaar from tracking a file then I can use:

bzr remove oldfile.py

Or alternatively I can just delete it using rm.

Bazaar VS Mercurial

I am pretty happy with both so far. I will probably use Bazaar for new projects at the moment as it seems a tiny bit more user friendly.

Having said that, the commands seem very similar, so I do not know why the world needs both? They are both in Python, both under the General Public Licence and they both do the same job. It seems a bit weird to have two.

While the new kid on the block, Bazaar seems to be well liked by hobbyists like me and groups at the 'community' end of the open source world, while hg seems to be more liked by the large corporate projects. So to take two examples, Ubuntu uses Bazaar for its' projects, while Solaris uses hg. Zope uses Bazaar while Java uses Mercurial. Yes the code to Java is maintained in a Python application, I can't say that I'm surprised, while Java has taken over the world in terms of people than can use it, it is still not fast at all in certain circumstances.

The performance benchmarks out there seem pretty dated but seem to favour hg over bazaar for ridiculously large projects (i.e. several gigabytes), however if high performance with a giant codebase over user-friendliness is your bag then you really want to be looking at git which is out in front (with hg in second and proprietary tools are way-way down the list).

Those benchmarks are irrelevant for me when 20 files is a pretty massive program. Also all projects are different, so no one system will win them all. I think it may be a couple of years still until the plates stop spinning and we can see who wins the distributed SCM world; in the centralised SCM generation, CVS eventuality became the dominant standard tool.

Other interesting things to look at would be graphical front-ends, Emacs plugins, and so on; but at this point, I can now manage my little project, so Bazaar passes the five minute test.