BZR

Bazaar (bzr) is a distributed version control system developed by Canonical Ltd. It is designed to support flexible workflows, offline work, and easy branching and merging. Bazaar integrates with Launchpad, Canonical's hosting service, and targets both individual and collaborative software development.

Overview and design: Bazaar is implemented in Python and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. A repository stores the full project history as a sequence of revisions, while each working copy contains a checked-out branch. Key concepts include repositories, branches, and working trees; changes are recorded as revisions with metadata such as author and timestamp. The dirstate tracks the present state of the working tree. Bazaar supports lightweight branches, merges, and a bundle mechanism for exchanging changes without network access.

Usage: Typical workflows use commands such as bzr init, bzr branch or bzr checkout to obtain a working copy; bzr add and bzr commit to record changes; bzr diff and bzr log to inspect history; and bzr merge, push, and pull to synchronize with others. There are also export and import utilities to exchange changes with other systems.

Interoperability and ecosystem: Bazaar offers several plugins and options for interoperability, including import/export paths and bridges to other version control systems. It has been used with Git and other tools through community-contributed bridges, and it integrates with Launchpad for hosting and collaboration.

Status: Since the mid-2010s, Bazaar's prominence has declined as Git and Mercurial gained popularity. Canonical and the community reduced active development, and new projects have largely moved to other DVCSs. Bazaar remains usable for existing repositories and for projects hosted on Launchpad, but it is no longer a primary choice for new development.