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MySQL moves from BitKeeper to Bazaar

Horay! Thank goodness, and about time too!

On the latter, I do appreciate that any such switch is a serious change for a development team, I was involved with this while at MySQL so I’m well aware of the issues 😉
Nevertheless, it was high time as it once again allows the rest of the world (outside of Sun/MySQL) to grab a repo and peruse the history properly. Long time ago (before bitkeeper turned fully evil) this was possible also. See MySQL is using Bazaar and Launchpad for their source code.

We had a distributed revision control talk in Bris a few weeks ago, by Ian Clatworthy of Canonical. We managed to do a video, but it’s not yet online. Various attendants including Damian Hickey (of the Freeway ecommerce project) now want to move to either bzr (Bazaar) or hg (Mercurial) as well, which is great (yes git is ok too). Move from what? Subversion. It’s a different way of working.

Look, subversion is better than cvs, but that doesn’t mean it’s brilliant. It seriously hinders and borks development processes, particularly for teams. Changing over is, particularly with bzr, quite easy. bzr can start operating in a similar setup to svn, and then you can shift across to the additional beautiful features it has. Good stuff.

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