Why bzr?

I've long been a (very contented) P4 user, both at work and at home. It's less than great to be emailing patches around, though. As I've been doing more work on measure I've found that I want more and more to do version controlled work on the same code here, there and everywhere. So, the new burst of interest in DVCS's has come along at just the right time.

I've chosen Bazaar as my first DVCS. Ed asked me why, and the answer turned out to be quite interesting (to me).

Firstly, why not git? Well, I am in general not a member of the linux world mainly because computers are for me (these days, anyway) a means not an end. I no longer enjoy installing this and (re)configuring that and (re)compiling the other just for the sheer joy of using up cycles and feeling as if I know something that others don't. Nor for squeezing out the last scintilla of performance, nor whatever it is that the 1337 do these days. I want a computer to do pretty much what I need out-of-the-box. That's why I'm a Mac user. So the idea that git provides the "plumbing" and then the "porcelain" (nice metaphor...) is built on top, well I'm bored already.

What does that leave? I head that darcs has these nasty performance cliffs that it falls off of, so no dice there. I have heard good things about Bazaar (specifically, that Nat likes it) so I'll go with that for now. So far, I really like it. Setting up exactly the distributed topology I need with the protections I want is proving to be a bit of a challenge, and the documentation seems to assume that I'm very familiar with...something...that I seem not to be (and I can't quite figure out what it is to go learn it, either), but so far so good.

I find myself a bit disappointed, though, that the FOSS crew have run quite so hard and fast with this. It's kind of a shame that people like Ed and myself can semi-legitimately get involved in a conversation about which DVCS and why. Summed over all the people like Ed and myself that's a lot of mental energy being poured down a black hole, across the industry as a whole. Especially since it seems as if there is almost nothing to choose between these tools. If only a strong industry player could have set the scene against which others could vary, but BitKeeper didn't (thinks: how much of this mess is really about sticking it to Larry McVoy "the man"?), and git hasn't, and now we have a soup of peers and all these nugatory factors to consider. What a waste.

PS: especially irksome is that I once had the pleasure of working with VisualAge for Java Micro Edition, which got all this pretty much exactly right a good long time ago.