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Mark Twain once noted, "The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time, you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say." Twain's observation is right on the mark (no pun intended), and his wisdom applies just as well to software. Invariably, the subtleties, nuances, and scope of the problem at hand become clear only after the application has been written. Between typing the first line of code and packaging a release, there are any number of false starts, dead ends, rewrites, refactorings, quandaries, bugs, and ultimately, epiphanies and breakthroughs.
Indeed, change is so constant during development that special software must be used to track modifications. Dubbed source control (or version control), this software records each and every revision made to the application. Source control lets you compare revisions, switch between one version of a file and another, and gather revisions into a release. And while features, paradigms, and best practices vary from one source control system to another—many proprietary and open source options are available—the intent is universal: Audit who did what and when. Popular commercial source control software includes Perforce and AccuRev; leading open source control software includes Subversion, Arch, Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar (see Resources for links).
Of the latter options, Bazaar is notable, because it's employed to produce the Ubuntu Linux® distribution—an enormous software project with thousands of components. Bazaar is special, too, because it can be adapted to virtually any team dynamic. For example, some development teams prefer centralization, where all changes are collected in and applied to one repository (Subversion is a centralized system). Other teams prefer decentralization, where each developer has an independent repository that can be shared as if it were the principal repository. In this scheme, one collectively owned repository can be designated as a hub for integration, but it differs only by convention (Git is a decentralized system). Another popular work style designates one developer as the "gatekeeper," who has sole access to a canonical repository. Changes are submitted to the gatekeeper who assembles, reviews, approves, and applies modifications to the master repository. Bazaar is flexible enough to accommodate each of these protocols. Like Subversion, Bazaar can sync with a central repository. Like Git, work can proceed locally, detached from any server.
Bazaar also has many other appealing features, such as an API for integration with other software tools, plug-ins to integrate Bazaar with Git and Subversion (among other systems), and a simple numbering scheme for branches that directly reflects the genealogy of each branch. You can also pick up Bazaar in a snap, making it a great choice for versioning your shell "dot" files, documents, and system configuration files. The documentation for Bazaar is outstanding—clear, concise, and practical.
Bazaar is available for all major operating systems. Source code is available, if you prefer to build from scratch, or you can download a suitable binary from the Bazaar home page (see Resources for links). Bazaar is a collection of command-line utilities, but the Bazaar community has also crafted a number of graphical utilities, if you prefer point-and-click interaction. You can accelerate and facilitate adoption with the point-and-click tools and switch to the command-line tools, as needed.
If you're using a UNIX® or Linux system, chances are that your distribution
offers a pre-built Bazaar package—typically abbreviated bzr;
Bazaar-related packages use the same shorthand for a prefix. For instance, if you
use Ubuntu or any Debian-derived Linux version, you can find and install Bazaar
software quickly with the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT). Use
apt-cache to search for bzr, as shown in
Listing 1.
Listing 1. Find all the Bazaar-related tools in the APT repository
$ apt-cache search bzr bzrtools - Collection of tools for bzr bzr-builder - construct a bzr branch from a recipe bzr-cvsps-import - CVS to Bazaar importer bzr-email - Notification email plugin for Bazaar bzr-fastimport - Fast-import/fast-export plugin for Bazaar bzr-git - Bazaar plugin providing Git integration bzr-gtk - provides graphical interfaces to Bazaar (bzr) version control bzr-loom - Focused patch plugin support for Bazaar bzr-pqm - bzr plugin to submit an email to a Patch Queue Manager bzr-rebase - Rebase plugin for Bazaar bzr-search - search plugin for Bazaar bzr-stats - statistics plugin for Bazaar bzr-svn - Bazaar plugin providing Subversion integration bzr-upload - Bazaar plugin for uploading to web servers ... bzr - easy to use distributed version control system # Install the core bzr package $ apt-get install bzr |
The latter shell command downloads and installs the core Bazaar components.
If your operating system does not provide Bazaar, it is easy to build from scratch,
especially on UNIX systems. To begin, download the Bazaar source tarball and
unpack it into a local scratch directory. Next, ensure that your system has
Python version 2.5 or later and the cElementTree,
paramiko, and Pyrex modules
for Python. Given the source and those modules, type the following to install Bazaar:
python setup.py install |
The installation adds Bazaar to /usr/local/bin. If you want to
install the software elsewhere, use the option --home,
and specify the full path name to the directory, as in python
setup.py install --home $HOME:
$ wget http://launchpad.net/bzr/2.1/2.1.0/+download/bzr-2.1.0.tar.gz $ tar xzf bzr-2.1.0.tar.gz $ cd bzr-2.1.0 $ sudo python setup.py install |
You control Bazaar through a single utility, aptly named bzr.
For a list of the most commonly used commands, type
bzr help, as shown in Listing 2.
If you want help with a specific command, type bzr help command,
where command is the name of the command,
such as bzr help init.
Listing 2. Available Bazaar commands
$ bzr help Bazaar -- a free distributed version-control tool http://bazaar-vcs.org/ Basic commands: bzr init makes this directory a versioned branch bzr branch make a copy of another branch bzr add make files or directories versioned bzr ignore ignore a file or pattern bzr mv move or rename a versioned file bzr status summarize changes in working copy bzr diff show detailed diffs bzr merge pull in changes from another branch bzr commit save some or all changes bzr send send changes via email bzr log show history of changes bzr check validate storage bzr help init more help on e.g. init command bzr help commands list all commands bzr help topics list all help topics |
A series of Bazaar commands is called a recipe, and the online help provides
countless recipes to jump start usage and teach best practices. For instance,
the material for bzr help init provides a recipe to
transform any directory into a Bazaar repository, as Listing 3
shows.
Listing 3. Recipe for transforming a directory into a Bazaar repository
$ cd ~/project $ bzr init $ bzr add . $ bzr status $ bzr commit -m "imported project" |
This recipe has five steps. To follow along, first change to the project directory you
want to keep under source control. Next, run bzr init
to add a subdirectory named .bzr to the current directory to contain the
bookkeeping metadata for the repository. The bzr add .
command recursively adds the contents of "dot" (the current directory) to the
manifest of files the repository manages. However, it does not create a snapshot of the
current state of the files. bzr commit actually records
the state of all files in the repository and adds a brief annotation. You can
provide the annotation as an argument to -m (be sure
to use quotation marks to keep the sentence intact) or omit the option and create
a note in your favorite text editor. bzr status reports
what's ready to add to the repository, what's been changed, what's been elided,
and more.
Bazaar shares much in common with other source control systems, although its implementations differ and, pleasingly, leverage facilities you already know how to use (such as Secure Shell (SSH) and URLs). Bazaar manages revisions and can diverge and merge to create and collect branches, respectively. Here are some of the key concepts in Bazaar:
- A revision is a collection of changes made to one or more files.
You might make a revision to fix a bug or implement a new feature.
Each revision has a unique ID (more on IDs momentarily), a sole
committer, and zero or more authors. The committer
is the developer who physically recorded the revision, while each
author receives an attribution recognizing his or her contribution to
the revision. Figure 1 shows a single revision.
Figure 1. A Bazaar revision
- Typically, each revision has a single predecessor or parent. Thus,
you can picture development as a chain of revisions, where each revision
builds on the changes captured in its parent. This scheme is shown in
Figure 2.
Figure 2. Some development proceeds as a series of revisions.
However, development is rarely so orderly, especially when many developers are working in parallel. A revision can have multiple predecessors, too. In this case, a revision represents a merge (see Figure 3 below).
Figure 3. Combining threads of development leads to a merge, a revision with multiple parents
- As mentioned above, a revision ID directly reflects the revision's lineage.
Revisions are numbered sequentially starting from 1 and are suffixed each
time a chain of development diverges or branches. For example, in
Figure 3, revision 2 diverges into two branches: 2.1
and 2.2. The first revision in branch 2.1 is 2.1.1; the second in the same
branch is 2.1.2, and so on. When two or more branches merge, the suffixes
are dropped and numbering returns to the previous scheme. Revision 3 is
the result of merging two branches. Figure 4 shows a
graphical tool that pictures Bazaar histories in much the same way as
Figure 3. Bazaar's revision numbering scheme is far
more meaningful and concise than, say, Git's, which uses long, cryptic
MD5 hashes as unique identifiers.
Figure 4. A graphical tool pictures Bazaar histories.
- A branch is simply a pointer to a tip revision, or a revision that has no successor in the same lineage. In Figure 3, revision 3 represents a branch, because it's the latest revision. In addition, revisions 2.1.2 and 2.2.2 are branches, because both are the ultimate revision in the 2.1 and 2.2 lineages, respectively.
One of the strengths of Bazaar is its reuse of existing, familiar paradigms. A branch is simply
a folder. You'll find other examples of common sense features throughout Bazaar. For
example, if you use Bugzilla to track bugs, you can annotate a revision as a bug fix
with the --fixes option.
In general, Bazaar manages entire directories of files. However, you can avoid doing so
if you want to omit certain files from version control or operate on individual
files or subdirectories. You need not use dot (.) to
operate on the entire current directory, either initially or during the lifetime
of the repository. Many Bazaar commands take a list of file and directory names
and operate only on the specified entities.
For example, if you changed files easy.c, medium.c, and hard.c but only want to commit the latter, simply name the file in the commit:
$ bzr commit -m "Fix bug no. 99." easy.c |
Better yet, Bazaar provides a special feature to group and isolate operations to
particular files. A view is a collection of files and directories. When
you enable a view, only the files in the collection are visible. You can create
multiple views and switch among them, and you can disable and enable a
view to reveal and hide files as necessary. As the Bazaar documentation summarizes,
"Defining a view does not delete the other files in the working tree—it
merely provides a 'lens' over the working tree." Commands like
bzr commit, bzr add, and
bzr ls restrict operation to the current view. Other
commands that operate on the file system are unaffected by views.
To ignore types of files, such as object files created by compilation or backup files
that your text editor generates, you can create an ignore file named
.bzrignore at the top level of your repository. Put this file under version
control, too, to help collaborators avoid adding spurious files to the repository.
The command bzr ignore adds entries to the file for you.
The ignore file does not omit files already under version control; it omits only those
not yet in the repository.
Oftentimes, a bug fix or enhancement spans multiple files and various sections of code in each file. Unless a developer is very careful to make discrete commits, features can become commingled making it difficult to connect a batch of changes to a bug report or enhancement request. Or, more frequently, a developer may find it necessary to revert a file to a particular state to isolate a bug. In both cases, the developer may want to tease individual revisions from the whole. Bazaar provides shelves just for this purpose. You can shelve, or set aside, revisions; make commits (if necessary); and then unshelve, or restore, the changes to pick up where you left off previously. Cleverly, Bazaar shelves individual diffs.
Here's one possible scenario. Assume that the file dictionary.txt contains three changes
since it was last committed to the repository. You can compare the current state
of your work with the repository using bzr diff, as
shown in Listing 4.
Listing 4. Compare current work against the repository version
$ bzr diff === modified file 'dictionary.txt' --- dictionary.txt 2010-04-10 23:57:00 +0000 +++ dictionary.txt 2010-04-10 23:58:40 +0000 @@ -1,2 +1,5 @@ +bonzo chico groucho +harpo +zeppo |
As the diff shows, the first, fourth, and fifth lines are new. To set aside the changes,
run bzr shelve. The command interactively prompts you
to persist or shelve each diff. If you want to annotate a shelf, provide the
-m option again, as shown in Listing 5.
Listing 5. Annotate a shelf
$ cat dictionary.txt bonzo chico groucho harpo zeppo $ bzr shelve -m 'Save other brothers for later.' --- dictionary.txt 2010-04-10 23:57:00 +0000 +++ dictionary.txt 2010-04-11 00:15:56 +0000 @@ -1,2 +1,5 @@ +bonzo chico groucho +harpo +zeppo Shelve? [yNfq?] y Selected changes: M dictionary.txt Shelve 1 change(s)? [yNfq?] y Changes shelved with id "1". |
If you now examine the file, you should see just two lines. You can also use
bzr shelve --list to see the list of shelves you have
available (see Listing 6).
Listing 6. View lists of shelves
$ cat dictionary.txt chico groucho $ bzr shelve --list 1: Save other brothers for later. |
The inverse of shelve is unshelve.
This command restores the file to its previous state, as shown in Listing 7.
Listing 7. Restore a file to its previous state
$ bzr unshelve Using changes with id "1". Message: Save other brothers for later. M dictionary.txt All changes applied successfully. Deleted changes with id "1". $ cat dictionary.txt bonzo chico groucho harpo zeppo |
Although Bazaar can realize a centralized version control scheme, it is perfectly capable of powering large-scale, distributed software development. Sharing is surprisingly simple and uses any number of existing UNIX sharing technologies.
The simplest technology—and the default unless you specify another
choice—is the local file system. You can share your branch with another
developer using the handle file://path/to/your/branch,
where path/to/your/branch is the absolute
path name to your branch, such as /Users/martin/code/emailer. Given the handle,
another developer can create a branch based on your work with a single command:
$ bzr branch file://Users/martin/code/emailer |
The branch command copies the complete history of this
branch so you have everything you need to merge, branch, scan history, and more.
Because a branch is just a folder, you need not use bzr branch.
You can also copy a branch via cp -pr, expanding a
tarball, or through a remote copy using something like rsync. You can also share a
branch via SFTP, HTTP, FTP, and a special protocol built for Bazaar, prefaced with
bzr:://. (For a complete list of supported protocols,
type bzr help urlspec at the command line.) Once you
have a branch, you can update it to match the state of the original using the
command bzr pull.
Publishing a branch is as simple as sharing the branch's URL. You don’t need a special server to publish a Bazaar branch, just make the branch's files and the .bzr directory available via any of the methods already mentioned. You can also push a branch (or the changes for a branch) with a special Bazaar command:
$ bzr push sftp://servername.com/path/to/directory |
Each of the commands that work with branches accept a URL.
Bazaar has too many features to list here. For a complete introduction and a large catalog of compatible software, see the Bazaar website. Bazaar also provides a "smart server" that tunnels a special Bazaar protocol via SSH. You or your systems administrator can establish a smart server to host your projects on your own source code server. The administration documentation also explains how to combine Bazaar with plug-ins that amend core features. Moreover, the software provides hooks where you can inject your own scripts and code to perform other actions, such as deploying code or running continuous integration tests.
Learn
-
Speaking
UNIX: Check out other parts in this series.
-
Bazaar online documentation: Learn how to use Bazaar.
-
Launchpad: This free source code hosting platform is
intended to share open source code. It offers integrated bug tracking, source code
reviews, mailing lists to coordinate teams, and more.
-
Canonical: Bazaar and Launchpad are sponsored
by Canonical, the purveyors of Ubuntu Linux.
-
AIX and UNIX developerWorks
zone: The AIX and UNIX zone provides a wealth of information relating to
all aspects of AIX systems administration and expanding your UNIX skills.
-
New to AIX and UNIX?
Visit the New to AIX and UNIX page to learn more.
-
Technology
bookstore: Browse the technology bookstore for books on this and other
technical topics.
Get products and technologies
-
Bazaar: Download the Bazaar software from
the project home page.
-
Git: Git is a popular version control system and is used
to coordinate development on the Linux kernel, among other substantial projects.
Git was created by Linux founder Linus Torvalds.
-
Subversion: This longstanding open source
version control system is available for nearly every operating system. Its
repositories are centralized. A number of graphical Subversion clients are available.
-
Mercurial: Mercurial is another recent entrant
in open source version control. It runs on all major operating systems.
Discuss
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Participate in the AIX and UNIX® forums:
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Martin Streicher is a freelance Ruby on Rails developer and the former Editor-in-Chief of Linux Magazine. Martin holds a Masters of Science degree in computer science from Purdue University and has programmed UNIX-like systems since 1986. He collects art and toys. You can reach Martin at martin.streicher@gmail.com.
