There are so many version control system for developers and users, e.g. CVS and Subversion. These 2 systems are all traditional ones which heavily rely on centralized model. In other words, you have to commit your change to the one and only one repository. If you don’t connect to the repository, you can’t do some operations especially commit the change. As a result, decentralized model has been studied to solve this problem. Bazaar-NG is one of powerful, cross-platform, and decentralized revision control system. It has been written in Python.

So the point is how it works. That is my question before I tried Bazaar. I have used CVS more than 6 years and Subversion for 2 years so it would be so easy to understand Bazaar quickly. To understand Bazarr you have to know about principles. In CVS and Subversion, you have only one repository and you must have write permission to commit your changes. When you want to modify the code, you have to check it out and then commit it back to the repository. If you want to change lots of code, it would be good to create new branch. In Bazaar, you don’t have any repository so you don’t need to check the code out. Only thing you can do is to create new branch. This principle makes things easier. That means you can commit your changes locally on your branch. From that branch, you may create new branch. When you want to publish your code to other developers, you just need to give read permission on the web. So, the project maintainer may merge your modification in the branch directly.

By the way, Bazaar is only suitable for highly active developers. It is not good to let nieve senior students use Bazaar since their advisor has to pay more attention to merge their code to the main repository. Actually, it is not Bazaar’s fault but it is the model’s fault.

The great thing in Bazaar is that you don’t need special features like dedicated daemon, a TCP port, web server, and WebDAV. Unfortunately, there is no GUI on Windows yet. Anyway, command line is fine. It is the best personal version control system for freelances.

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