Open-source projects often face the problem of keeping track of a project’s code, while avoiding stifling developers’ creativity. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, claims it has a solution to that problem: Bazaar 1.0, its new version control system.
Unlike most VCSs (version control systems), Bazaar is a distributed, rather than centralized, system. This may sound like a recipe for a VCS that wouldn’t work well. Despite this, in a statement Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical CEO and Ubuntu’s founder, said that “Bazaar is designed for global teams of collaborating developers.”
Shuttleworth explained, “A large open-source project like Ubuntu requires an extremely intuitive, robust and flexible version control system to accommodate hundreds of people working on shared code. But distributed software engineering is not limited to the open-source world: corporate and proprietary software development is increasingly done by teams that span companies, continents and time-zones and need the ability to manage their work in an efficient distributed fashion.”
According to Canonical, a centralized VCS may work fine for proprietary, tightly controlled projects, but it doesn’t work well for open-source or outsourced projects where programmers are often scattered across the globe. The company also claims that “Bazaar has been used successfully by commercial projects with hundreds of developers spanning multiple continents.”
Read the full story on Linux-Watch.com: Canonical Releases Version 1.0 of ‘Bazaar’ Version Control Tool