Greetings Ineiev, Thank you for your reply.
On Fri, Jul 4, 2025 at 11:01 AM Ineiev <ine...@gnu.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 03:26:59PM -0600, Richard Wilbur wrote: > ... > > 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. > > Do they drop Bazaar support generally or just for this feature? > In other words, are they going to maintain their fork of Bazaar? > Canonical originally adopted Bazaar as their Version Control Software for hosting code repositories on launchpad.net. They hired the main developer, Robert Collins, and eventually a team to work full-time on Bazaar. By the time I was appointed as the GNU project maintainer (2014) Canonical had reprioritized those developers to other internal projects and some had left Canonical's employ. The development and maintenance had been on a strictly volunteer basis for a while by that time. Since then Canonical hasn't committed any resources to maintaining Bazaar (except continuing to host the projects on launchpad.net and the mailing lists). The Continuous Integration worked until September 2016. In 2017 several ex-Canonical Bazaar developers made a fork they have decided to call Breezy. The Breezy project is hosted on launchpad.net. They will transition their source code to git repository hosting on launchpad.net, I presume. They weren't interested in taking on a relationship with the GNU project. Recently Canonical has announced that they will soon drop hosting of bzr repositories on launchpad.net. I need to get a copy of all the branches I'd like to keep and migrate them to savannah. > > 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.) > > I think it's possible, more or less; the first issue I can see is > naming: the 'bazaar' group already exists at Savannah. > Is the 'bazaar' group a Unix user group or a Savannah user group? We might be able to create a group called something like 'bzr-dev' if we need something specifically for bzr development. > > 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+. > > Assigning the copyright to the FSF would give the GNU Project > more flexibility in licensing Bazaar, but it I don't think > it's crucial for Bazaar development; and I can think of no > advantages in assigning the copyright to someone else. > >From what they are saying in the discussion forum[*] it sounds like Canonical doesn't plan to do any further development or support of Bazaar. So they might be amenable to assigning the copyright to the FSF. That could simplify license adjustments like moving to GPL 3+, if desired. > If you are willing to have me join the Savannah Hackers, where do I start? > > I would start with migrating Bazaar. > Will do. > What are the first spate of issues to consider the process of project > > migration to Savannah? > > Perhaps finding out what is missing in Savannah and what is not. > I'll start looking at that. Thank you very much for the pointers. Sincerely, Richard Reference: [*] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/phasing-out-bazaar-code-hosting/62189
