Once upon a time, Bazaar was a distributed version control system. Now, let’s delve into its story.
Bazaar is a friendly, powerful tool. It helps people collaborate on software development. Bazaar records the project’s history making copying easy. Merging changes between projects becomes simple with Bazaar.
Imagine teams collaborating. They are using Bazaar to manage their code. They track every change with ease. Bazaar ensures no work is lost.
Bazaar was the main version control system for Launchpad. Launchpad is a project by Canonical. It is also part of the GNU System.
GNU Bazaar’s commands are similar to those in CVS or Subversion. You can start a new project without a remote server. Just use “bzr init” in your directory. Bazaar then versions that directory.
Bazaar supports working with or without a central server. You can use both methods at the same time. Launchpad and SourceForge offer free hosting for Bazaar projects.
Bazaar works with other revision control systems too. You can branch from Subversion. Make changes and commit them to a Bazaar branch. Later, merge them back. It offers read-only access for Git and Mercurial. Bazaar also allows history import/export from CVS, Darcs, Git, and Perforce.
Bazaar supports files with names from the complete Unicode set. Commit messages and names can also be in Unicode.
The name “Bazaar” was first used by a fork of GNU arch client, tla. This fork is now called Baz. This was to distinguish it from Bazaar-NG. Robert Collins, a Canonical employee, announced Baz in October 2004.
Martin Pool was hired by Canonical in February 2005. He was tasked with building a distributed version control system. He wanted open-source hackers to love it. The first pre-release, 0.0.1, was launched on March 26, 2005.
Version 1.0 of Bazaar came out in December 2007. In February 2008, Bazaar became a GNU Project. Martin Pool left Canonical in April 2012. Jelmer Vernooij stepped down from contributing at the end of 2012. He had contributed for seven years.
In January 2014, GNU Emacs transitioned from Bazaar to Git. The Bugzilla project also retired Bazaar for Git in March 2014. They felt Bazaar was almost dead.
Bazaar version 2.7.0 was released in February 2016.
Bazaar was forked as Breezy in 2017. This allowed for changes that weren’t backwards compatible. An example of this is migrating from Python 2 to Python 3.
Ubuntu and Debian used Bazaar. Launchpad also used it. These projects were active in the Bazaar community.
So, remember Bazaar. It helped developers collaborate. It tracked changes efficiently. Though its active development slowed, its impact remains.