Bazaar Review

A Version Control Tool Designed For Everyone

Bazaar is an easy to use and learn revision control tool suitable not only for highly-skilled developers and elite hackers but actually for everyone, whether expert or casual users. Users can run commands within the system easily, as it has a command line tool that delivers instructions on how to use each command properly. In addition, Bazaar applies sequential numbering on a per-branch basis, unlike other version control systems such as Apache Subversion and Mercurial SCM (per repository). This way, developers will be able to identify and track revisions much easier.

Lets Your Work Offline

One of the coolest features of Bazaar is that it uses a distributed or decentralized approach to version control. In this model or approach, a project can have several different repositories which can be stored locally. In other words, developers can still work offline in case they got disconnected from the main server. From these local or remote repositories, they will be able to access not only the latest revisions of the source code but the complete copy of the history for the branch.

Supports Centralized And Gatekeeper Workflows

Although Bazaar is primarily a distributed version control system it is designed to adapt to different types of workflows and processes, making it a very flexible solution. Development teams who are working on their projects using a centralized workflow need not to change or abandon their own workflow if they decide to migrate to Bazaar. They can check out from the main server, apply their revisions, and commit them to the main server same as how they usually do it using Apache Subversion and CVS (Concurrent Versions System, which are centralized version control tools.

Other version control tools like Git and Mercurial SCM are as flexible as Bazaar in such a way that they also support different workflows. However, there is a feature available in Bazaar which can’t be found both in Git and Mercurial SCM. That feature is called bound branching. Bound branching enables developers to check first if the files they have changed are up to date with the central repository or branch before they are able to commit locally, synchronizing local and main branches.

This is actually a mechanism that provides a stricter way to implement centralized version control. At the same time, using bound branches is useful for gatekeeper workflows or those workflows that have a single person in charge of reviewing changes before they are merged and committed to the main branch. By making the local branch bound to the main branch, the gatekeeper only needs to perform a single commit.

Octopus Merging

Bazaar providers developers with a smarter way to combine their changes or revisions together, helping them improve how they collaborate with each other on their projects. The revision control solution supports octopus merging. This is a type of merge that allows developers to merge three or more batches together all at once. So how does octopus merging actually work? Let us first see the typical way of merging branches.

For example, when a repository has three branches that contain a history of feature changes and these branches need to be merged to the main or master branch so that the feature changes from each branch will be added to the main branch; usually, this is done by performing three merge commits. This means the branches are merged to the main branch one at a time, merging two branches together in each merge commit. Thus, branch 1 is merged to the main branch, followed by branch 2 and branch 3. With octopus merging, all of the three branches are merged to the main branch at once, thereby allowing users to perform just a single merge commit.

Directory And File Rename Tracking

Bazaar also offers a unique way to track renames. With Bazaar, developers will be able to go beyond file rename tracking which means they can also track directory renames wherein directories are treated not just as containers of files as can be observed in Apache Subversion, Git, and Mercurial SCM.