Horrible title, but I couldn’t resist. Apparently, I need to get in a time machine and catch up on the latest and greatest in version control systems (VCS). Bazaar (bzr for short) is a distributed version control system along the lines of BitKeeper, git, and a number of others. I’d be lying if I told you I completely understand the advantages of a distributed version control system over a centralized one like Subversion. But, the cool guys from Joyent seemed pretty hyped up about Bazaar as their VCS of choice in one of their podcasts I listened to a couple of weeks ago. Oh, and that little Linux distro uses it too. What’s the name again? Ubuntu. That’s it! Ubuntu uses Bazaar to manage the complexity of such a large code base.
I started to read a bit more about decentralized VCS; knowing that Linus Torvalds is a HUGE proponent of it I figured I’d see what he had to say. I found this crazy long email reply Linus gives about a month ago to Adam Treat of the KDE dev team, who asked Linus some questions about moving from Subversion to git. It makes my brain hurt trying to think about version control in the way Linus does. I’m not even going to try to summarize his thoughts here because I’m still processing them. I hope to come back and elaborate some more if I get the time to check out Bazaar and further investigate if distributed VCS is something that makes sense for a company like Gestalt to consider using.
P.S. Knowing version control systems, the important functions they serve and how to properly use them in configuration management is key to being an ideal QCer on an agile team in my (rarely) humble opinion.