Greetings Savannah Hackers, My name is Richard Wilbur, my Savannah account name is richard_wilbur (account # 95876), and as the GNU package maintainer for Bazaar I'm interested in joining your ranks to help provide support for Bazaar repository hosting in Savannah. I'm also interested to engage in other work when I have the time and expertise to help further the development of Savannah. I have experience in several languages, including PHP and SQL. I have used GNU/Linux since 1994. I administered IBM AIX servers as a student employee of the College of Natural Sciences at California State University San Bernardino in 1992-1994. I have administered my own GNU/Linux http, ftp, wireguard, and ssh servers for several years.
I was notified on 5 Jun 2025: "For those who haven't seen it, Canonical is planning to sunset Bazaar support in Launchpad in a couple of months. If you don't want to lose your Bazaar branches, you'll need to migrate them somewhere else. See [1] " When I was appointed GNU package maintainer for Bazaar back on 6 Jan 2014, the team of full-time developers Canonical had previously hired to work on Bazaar as the main Version Control Software for launchpad.net--their project hosting platform--had all been reassigned to other duties. Thus all Bazaar development was on a volunteer basis and the pace had slowed. Bazaar development was hosted on launchpad.net at that point[2]: E-mail lists, teams, code repositories (with branch merge request/code review infrastructure), bug database, translations, documentation website, question/answer forum, automated testing and merge of branches that pass code review and test suite. Copyright was held by Canonical and contributors had to sign a "Contributor License Agreement" CLA[3] before their contributions would be accepted into the codebase. At the point when I was appointed it was natural to continue with the project infrastructure as already set up and working on launchpad.net, so I didn't seriously consider moving development to savannah.org. I used the launchpad.net infrastructure along with those who had set it up who were willing to work with me to release bzr v2.7.0 on 15 Feb 2016. On 19 Sep 2016 I found out that my bzr collaborator (and Canonical employee), Vincent Ladeuil, was working on a replacement for our Continuous Integration (CI) tool, the Bazaar Patch Queue Manager (bzr-pqm), so I stopped approving and submitting branches to be merged into the repository. On 1 Jun 2017 Vincent Ladeuil stepped down from both his employment at Canonical and his involvement with the bzr project. At that point the new CI infrastructure he had been working on was: "Up and running but hosted by canonical and requiring canonical credentials." I did not have those credentials, I wasn't contacted by anyone at Canonical, nor did I get any response when I reached out to several folks at Canonical I had collaborated with in the past to fix bzr packaging and build issues. When I raised an issue regarding Launchpad support for Continuous Integration on Bazaar branches they said it was not currently supported but I could implement it through the Launchpad API on an external server. Now: 1. I am interested to move the Bazaar development hosting to Savannah. (The whole deal, if possible: E-mail lists, teams, code repositories, code reviews, bug database, documentation, automated testing for approved branches, questions and answers, translations.) 2. I wonder whether Canonical would be willing to assign the copyright to the FSF or some other organization? Would that be better? Currently code is copyrighted by Canonical and licensed as GPL 2+. 3. I have some experience writing PHP and SQL code (among other languages), am willing--no eager--to learn new things, and would be happy to contribute effort for the future of Savannah. If you are willing to have me join the Savannah Hackers, where do I start? What are the first spate of issues to consider the process of project migration to Savannah? Sincerely, Richard Wilbur References: [1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/phasing-out-bazaar-code-hosting/62189 [2] https://launchpad.net/bazaar [3] https://ubuntu.com/legal/contributors
