Source Code

Towards a techincal definition of Open Source

Version Control

To manage our source code, we use bzr, an advanced third-generation distributed version control system.

We chose bzr (Bazaar-NG, as it was briefly known) as the VCS for our technical work for Bazaar's relative straight-forwardness and because of our faith in the ethos and extreme competence of its developers. Anyone experienced with the old world first-generation centralized VCS tools like CVS or Subversion can make sense of it in minutes. Bazaar is constantly improving in performance terms, has a vibrant developer community, is widely portable, and most of all the fact that they actually follow test-driven-development practices (their unit test suite has over 10,000 tests) biases in their favour.

In production use for the last 18 months, we have found Bazaar to be reliable, amazingly easy for newcomers to the Open Source world to learn, and a big contributor toward reducing barriers to entry.

Some people have argued that they should wait to see which 3rd generation decentralized version control system will "win" before migrating away from svn or god forbid cvs. This is, in our view, foolish – none of Bazaar, Git or Mercurial are going to go away; the determining factor, rather, is usability – and that makes the choice an easy one.