Selecting file encoding in QBzr

Naoki INADA recently provided nice patch for QBzr which added handy encoding selector to QBzr windows where content of user files is shown, including diff viewer (qdiff command), annotation viewer (qannotate command) and file content viewer (qcat and  qviewer commands). This feature is in the trunk now and will be released with QBzr 0.17.

This is very useful feature for all who works with non-ascii documents. By default QBzr assumes that encoding of your document is UTF-8, and this is safe default for Linux users. Unfortunately on Windows documents typically created in ANSI encoding (e.g. CP1251 for Russian, CP1252 for Western Europe, and so on). So having the way to specify encoding to see your actual text instead of $%^&#@&* garbage is very important.

So now you can control the encoding not only from command-line (option --encoding) but from GUI as well. Encoding selector(s) available at the bottom of dialogs as com

Diff viewer:

Annotation:

Selected encoding is remembered and saved in branch configuration file branch.conf as encoding = xxx.

Hint: if you most of the time working with files of one encoding, you can put the encoding setting in main configuration file bazaar.conf:

[DEFAULT]
email = Joe Random <joe@example.com>
encoding = cp1251

And this settings will be used by default for all branches where no encoding specified in command-line or branch.conf.

Bazaar System Administrator’s Guide

Neil started on a System Administrator’s Guide for Bazaar. The current text is here and it’s in the lp:~nmb/bzr/admin-guide branch.

Patch Pilots

We’ve just started a patch pilot project in Bazaar, to make sure that patches aren’t lost in the noise, or stalled waiting for cleanups or tests to be added. In particular, we care a lot about testing for Bazaar, and testing well, but adding good tests can be harder than just making a two-line change that seems to fix the problem.

Andrew’s just finished the first stint as pilot, with good results: several patches landed, and people apparently having an easier time getting them.

I wonder how it will go? Will we keep finding the time to prioritize pilotage, and will there be positive feedback from contributors?

Bazaar documentation in Japanese

Thanks to INADA Naoki (and friends?), Bazaar documentation is now available in Japanese.

Bazaar Explorer, now in Lithuanian!

The Bazaar Explorer GUI is now available in 11 human languages (and partially translated into a few more) including Algis Kaballa’s recent translation into Lithuanian.

New Working Tree Features in QBzr

A number of new features have been added to QBzr, related to the management of your working tree. These feature are available from both qbrowse, and qcommit, and are available in the qbzr 0.16 release.

As you can see in the screen shot, we now show conflicts in the status column. Behind the scenes, “Merge conflict” uses extmerge, so that need installed and configured to work. “Mark conflict resolved” does a bzr resolve on the selected file.

“Remove” will unversion, and remove the file. It will prompt you if there are uncommitted changed that will be removed.

Moving and renameing

There are 3 new features that allow you to move or rename a file:

• You can select rename from the context menu, and enter a new name.
• You can move a file by drag it to a new folder.
• If you have renamed or moved a file outside of bzr, you can select the old path (missing), and the new path (unversoined) and chose “Mark as moved/renamed”.
  

welcome garyvdm!

Gary van der Merwe, a long-standing bzr and qbzr contributor, is the newest bzr pqm committer.

mcrepogen

Neil Martinsen-Burrell just announced MCREPOGEN, a tool to generate random version control histories for Bazaar or anything that can read the fastimport format.

It uses a Markov Chain model where the states are directory trees and various changes to the tree have associated probabilities. The intent is that by giving complete control over the characteristics of the history, performance testing of different aspects of VCS can be improved.

Bazaar Survival Guide progress

As part of my drive to make it easier for users to switch to Bazaar, I’ve been working with some of our community members on a Bazaar Survival Guide, a manual explaining Bazaar to refugees of other tools in terms they already know. We now have sections for CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Darcs, Monotone and ClearCase users. Hopefully, we’ll have sections soon for other popular tools.

A huge thanks to everyone who has helped with this! I think it is coming along nicely.

Ten reasons to switch to Bazaar

Are you a Bazaar fan and need some help explaining to others why Bazaar is cool? I published a document last week called Why switch to Bazaar? that may help. I’ve tried hard to present the big picture together with some concrete examples, explaining what we stand for and what that means to users, teams and communities in reality. Furthermore, if you tried Bazaar 1.x but found it too slow or inefficient, I’m sure you’ll find the Bazaar 2.0 benchmarks included in the document great news.

I hope you find the document interesting and food for thought. If there are any mistakes or you’ll like to translate the document to another language, please let me know.