[I tried before to describe everything; it was too long.  Take two.]

Bazaar 2.1 is going to feature-freeze later this week and release next month.  We’ll support 2.1 with bugfix updates for at least a year, perhaps more.  2.1 has over 200 bug fixes and incremental improvements (see the release notes), and a mostly-new system adminstrator’s guide.  Memory usage for many operations has halved, and John released off the Meliae Python memory profiler that he built while doing this.

Much of the feature innovation happened in plugins including (Explorer, Pipeline, builddeb and bzr-colo) rather than the core, which perhaps is as it should be for an increasingly mature product. We now have a kind of Good Food Guide(tm) for bzr plugins.

I like what we’ve done, but beyond 2.1 it would be nice to do a larger headline feature, as well as incremental fixes. On the Canonical side it’s going to largely go by feedback from Ubuntu developers as they use Bazaar more widely.

TortoiseBzr (integration into the Microsoft Windows shell) is now being internationalized, with Japanese and Spanish translations now almost complete.

If you speak any language other than English, you can help with translation.

Bryce writes:

When Inkscape moved to Launchpad, the Bazaar team asked if Inkscape would be adopting bzr as well.

With the Inkscape 0.47 release out, and following a rather lengthy series of debates on git vs. bzr vs svn, we have switched to Bazaar. Thanks go to Ted Gould for doing all the heavy lifting in shifting things over (and winning many hearts and minds).

From the Inkscape 0.47 release manager just now:

<ScislaC> I LOVE bazaar! :D

Finally a vcs I can use via command line in a way that makes sense to me and I don’t feel like I’ll accidentally make a bad commit.

One of the primary reasons why Bazaar exists is that Canonical wants to make it as easy as possible for more people to contribute to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects. After many years of development, the pieces of the puzzle are really falling into place nicely. See the tutorial I put together last week to see just how easy it can be.

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 combobox. Such encoding selector is very important for users of TortoiseBzr and Bazaar-Explorer, because they’re using QBzr dialogs from corresponding GUI applications.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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”.