Tla and Bazaar Branching

Status

• Created: 23/04/05 by RobertCollins

• Priority: HighPriority

• People: RobertCollinsLead, AaronBentleySecond

• Contributors:

• Interested: MartinPool, AndresSalomon, RobWeir, JamesBlackwell

• Status: EditedSpecification, BazaarSpecification, MarkShuttleworthQueue

• Branch:
• Malone Bug:
• Packages:
• Depends:

• UduSessions: 2

Introduction

This specification discusses the branding and positioning of Bazaar with respect to TLA and Gnu Arch.

Rationale

Baz is emerging as an excellent tool for distributed software development. Bazaar-NG, started after the Bazaar project promises to be an even more excellent tool. The Bazaar branding at the moment does not take Bazaar-NG into account. Also the TLA take-up of Bazaar improvements seems to be quite slow. This needs discussion.

Scope

This spec defines the strategy for branding of Bazaar. Bazaar will be branded as 'Bazaar is a distributed revision control system that is backwards compatible with GNU Arch and will be fully compatible with Bazaar-NG'.

Some new features in Bazaar have affected TLA archives - while they don't break tla, this should not be done in future, and the existing features should not do this anymore (except where folk are already doing it, where an 'opt in' flag should be provided).

A new specification - BazSwitch - is being created to address some perceived awareness of Bazaar issues.

Implementation Plan

• RobertCollins to update the Bazaar website and primary wiki pages.

• RobertCollins to create bugs for any overly intrusive-on-tla-archive feature

• A new wiki is created for Bazaar. The most important pages from the Gnu Arch wiki are ported over to the Bazar wiki. This is kosher, because the Gnu Arch wiki is GPLed. It also makes sense by itself, because more and more, tla instructions do not apply directly to baz.
• A new Bazaar mailing list is created at lists.canonical.com. At least initially, this list will be used both for end-user discussion, and for development discussion. It may be split if there is too much traffic.
• The #bazaar channel on freenode is put into action. www.loglibrary.com is requested to log the channel.

Outstanding Issues

• To what extent do we wish to consult the community about this change in direction? Or do we take an "If we build it, they will come" approach?

  --RobertCollins: well 30% of the BOF was 'the community' - and I think that the reasons for branding more strongly are such that the community will come.