Hi all, Quick reminder for those who don't follow gnu-arch-dev and gnu-arch-users:
Tom announced he was abandonning GNU Arch maintainership[1], and later[2] precised the list of orphanned projects. In the meantime, Canonical is moving its efforts from the current version of Bazaar (baz) to what used to be called Bazaar-NG (bzr). "baz" is considered as "Bazaar 1.x", and Bazaar-NG will be "Bazaar 2.0". The team expect bzr to be useable to host the launchpad project in October, and should release the first stable version in late 2005 or beginning of 2006. Bazaar 2.0 is a complete rewrite, in python, of a revision control inspired from Bazaar 1.x, but will be quite different, though. This means several things: tla 1.x is probably dead. Tom's suggestion was to continue developing it based on Bazaar improvements, but up to now, no one proposed to become the maintainer, and I don't think this will happen one day. tla 2.0 is clearly dead. Tom was the only developer. tla 2.0 is mostly a clone of git, which already has a strong comunity, so, anyone interested in contributing to something similar to tla 2.0 will prefer git. Bazaar 1.x will continue to be supported for some time, but the 1.5 release should be the last bringing real new features (but there are some already developed features that you should appreciate). My plans for Xtla are as follow: I'll release a 1.2 more or less synchronized with Bazaar 1.5 (there are some compatibility fixes for baz 1.5 in the development version of Xtla). This will be the last release supporting tla as a backend (this doesn't mean I'll throw the tla code away immediately, but I'll make no effort to keep the compatibility afterwards). In October, I'll start looking at what can be done to port Xtla to Bazaar 2.0. Depending on how different it is from Bazaar 1.x, I'll try to keep the compatibility with Bazaar 1.x, or actually fork Xtla and drop support for Bazaar (this means we may end up with Xtla supporting Bazaar 1.x, and "Ebaz" -- or whatever better name we can find -- supporting only Bazaar 2.x). My dream is to have a good enough abstraction layer, similar to VC, but oriended towards distributed modern RCS, and on top of which support for different backends can be implemented (people may want support for git or mercurial in Emacs with a similar interface). I can hardly say how long this will take, and how much time I'll be able to spend on this. -- Matthieu [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2005-08/msg00030.html [2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2005-08/msg00131.html
