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I am looking to start a project with distributed source control and am evaluating the different options. Looking at Bazaar, I stumbled over several articles (e.g. this) that development has slowed down significantly.

What is the status of the project bazaar? Are bugs getting fixed?

ARF
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I will try to answer first with facts.

1/ According to the Active (published) Bazaar branches of Bazaar, we can see that there is 8 active development branches (changed since beginning of 2013)

2/ According to Bazaar 2.6b3 milestone, 3 bugs out of 12 are fixed for the next 2.6b3 release. This version started 6 month ago (August 2012).

3/ According to Bazaar v2.5 series, v2.5 series had a beta/minor release every month.

4/ According to Bazaar v2.6 series, v2.6 series has a beta/minor release every 4 months (well, there are not so many releases to give trends here).

5/ Bazaar is still used on prestigious/ambitious/large projects : Ubuntu, Debian,  MySql , Launchpad ... projects that are active in the Bazaar community.

So the first observation is that releases are less frequent, clearly.
One may think it's bad trends, but one can consider that the application is now mature enough and that new road map (with new features) needs to be forecast.

To finish, here is an extract of a IRC chat I had with bzr team. This may point out the issue with intermediate release.

trident_job: Hi there. I've seen that latest bzr version is v2.6.2 and is 1 year ago (nearly).
trident_job: next version v2.6.3 still have 3 bugs to fix ... do you think the project is stall ?

mmm: we lack anyone who's job it is to do the release these days
mmm: you're right that there's stuff on trunk that could have done with being released a good while ago

trident_job: mmm: yeah, that's not good advertisement for an open source project to have 1 year release cycle

mmm: well poked... so, probably an rt unfortunately

UPDATE 2013.09.20 : Bazaar retrospective from a dev. Read especially the last two chapters :

  • Bazaar on the slow track
  • Conclusion
Community
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TridenT
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  • Thanks. From when is the IRC log approximately? I am going to assume it is quite recent. - Regarding the state of Bazaar: Am I right to understand that the take-home message from your answer is: Bazaar has stabilised and works well. Abandonment is unlikely as a few high-profile projects are using it. BUT currently it is severly understaffed and progress and maintenance is minimal? – ARF Feb 18 '13 at 17:41
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    This IRC log is 3 weeks old. To my mind, Bazaar is stable enough (I'm using it daily both personally and professionally). Abandonment is surely unlikely, even if Bazaar is less common than GIT or Mercurial, it is a really serious and strong alternative (depending on your needs, features ...). I would summarize by saying Bazaar is is a slow curve by now, this may be quite common on open source development !?! – TridenT Feb 18 '13 at 17:49
  • Great answer thanks - though I believe I am missing some cultural background to understand what you mean by "slow curve". Though from context I get the message of your answer. – ARF Feb 18 '13 at 17:58
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    UPDATE 2013.09.20 : Bazaar retrospective from a dev. – TridenT Sep 20 '13 at 19:50
  • Very nice fact sheet :-) – janos Sep 23 '13 at 21:49
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    Also very interesting are the commits by month: https://www.openhub.net/p/bazaar/commits/summary – Torsten Bronger Nov 06 '14 at 12:51
  • @TridenT, What does "probably an rt" mean? – Pacerier Jan 16 '15 at 07:22
  • Last update (read it to understand) : https://answers.launchpad.net/bzr/+question/265002 – TridenT Oct 26 '15 at 21:42