This Week in Bazaar

This is the eighth (wow, 2 whole months of solid updates, yipee!) in a series of posts about current topics in the development world of the Bazaar distributed version control system. The series is co-authored by John Arbash Meinel, one of the primary developers on Bazaar, and Elliot Murphy, who drinks the rain. This week we are joined by Martin Albisetti, talking about Loggerhead, and dreaming of a cold pint.

bzr-search, loggerhead, gnome, and you

Robert Collins recently published his awesome bzr-search plugin, and John Carr has been doing a lot of work on setting up a bzr mirror of Gnome. A neat search module and a bunch of source trees is just begging to be combined in some sort of web interface!

There are a few web front ends for Bazaar at the moment, such as Loggerhead, webserve, viewbzr, and bzrweb. Today we are going to be focusing on Loggerhead (you can also go to its Launchpad project page to watch the development activity). It is probably the one with the most active development at the moment. An installation of the latest stuff in action is available at the bzr mirror of Gnome. Loggerhead shows side-by-side diffs, has RSS feeds, and lets you download specific changes, just like you would expect.

You can get the latest version of it yourself by doing:
bzr branch lp:loggerhead
You'll need python-simpletal and python-paste. Then by running "serve-branches.py" in the directory where you're branches live, you should be up and running with your own web interface. Eventually serve-branches.py is to expected to become a bzr plugin which will let you easily serve your branches with a single bzr command.

We hinted at it above; recent versions have started integrating with bzr-search. So for branches that you've run "bzr index" on, it can give hints in the search dialog, and quickly find revisions that match your search terms. You can try it yourself by just typing a few letters into the search dialog.

In the coming weeks, Loggerhead will be getting a bit of a face lift with a new theme to make its externals as shiny and new as its internals.

So give it a poke, and send any feedback to either bazaar@lists.canonical.com, or https://bugs.launchpad.net/loggerhead.