Bazaar 2.4 version control system includes long term support

The developers behind the Bazaar distributed version control system have released a new version which includes long term support. Updates to the 2.4.x development branch will, from now on, be limited to bug fixes, with new features going into version 2.5, the new development version. Long term support will run until February 2013. Bazaar 2.4 is compatible with earlier versions, and developers can read from and write to repositories generated using Bazaar 2.0 or later with the new version. The development team is, however, advising users to update to the new version.

Version 2.4 of Bazaar requires Python 2.6 or later; support for Python 2.4 and 2.5 has been dropped. New features include the ability to merge change logs using the changelog_merge plug-in and the ability to create other merge tools for use with Bazaar. In total the latest release includes more than 150 bug fixes and changes, details of which can be found in the release notes.

Its biggest sponsor, Canonical, is also the major sponsor behind Ubuntu, and Bazaar has a strong user base as a result of this connection, as Ubuntu development relies on Bazaar. Launchpad, a platform for Ubuntu-related development, also uses Bazaar.

But the distributed version control system is not limited to Linux and Ubuntu – installation packages are available for other operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and BSD. Bazaar was born out of the same motivations as its competitors, and the concepts underpinning Bazaar are not substantially different from those behind Mercurial and Git – even the commands are very similar. There is also an Eclipse plug-in which can be installed via the update site. Bazaar is licensed under GPLv2.

(crve)