Fun at the Bazaar sprint

Last week was the Bazaar sprint, which was fantastic and tiring. Somehow even the people who’d been at UDS just before made it through five packed days of fixing bugs, preparing releases, and debugging package imports. We were most hospitably hosted at the Canonical offices a long way up Millbank tower. But even those who couldn’t be there in person to enjoy the view were part of the experience. At home in the Ukraine Alexander wore his Bazaar shirt in support during the first day. On IRC larstiq and santagada ran the test suite on pypy and investigated incompatibilities. And all week we had a small robot John sitting in the middle of the table on the line from the Netherlands, working on performance bugs and offering helpful advice.

There were two new faces introduced. Max has been a stalwart maintaining the ~bzr PPAs and getting daily builds working. Jonathan is joining the Bazaar team on rotation from Kubuntu, which is very exciting for fans of qbzr. He started getting to know bzrlib by taking on some bugs tagged ‘easy’ and pair programming on harder ones. It was a bit tough to keep track of everything going on, but good progress was made on the Ubuntu Distributed Development front, the translation framework branches Naoki put together were landed, and lots of pet bugs were fixed. Download bzr 2.4b3 now to see the rest of the results for yourself.

After these long days in front of screens a nice meal out was a welcome treat. Over dinner we even managed to get on to topics other than code on occasion. On Thursday evening everyone went to As You Like It at the Globe as groundlings. Even with the language barrier to overcome for some of the sprinters, the comedy lived up to the categorisation. Trying to use the cycle hire scheme to travel there and back proved more of an obstacle. The bikes themselves were fine, provided you could get past the terrible computer interface and persuade the system to let you rent them. Now, if only they took patches for that…