Context

Bazaar (bzr) is a nifty version control system. I’m still a fan of subversion (svn), but there are things that svn just won’t do. For instance, if you want to publish your code to the open world, with svn, you end up with two options:

1. You host it yourself on a dedicated server
2. You have it hosted on either a paying site or for free (e.g. on SourceForge or Google Code)

I’ve been using the first solution for a while (got a dedicated server running in my closet with a dynamic dns), but I was at a point where I wanted to allow faster access to the repository. I host sample code that I give to my students, and when they’re all accessing the files at the same time, my internet connection is just not enough. On the other hand, I have a web host, so I figured this is where the repository should be. Except, my web host does not support subversion.

Why Bazaar

Bazaar is lightweight and decentralized. That’s what caught my attention. It’s meant to be used as a distributed version control tool – meaning it can be used in a decentralized manner. You checkout a branch anonymously, you work in it, you can commit changes to your local branch. Once you’re done, you can push back to the remote branch. Or, you can have other people checkout from your local branch and they can work on their side. The best part (as far as I was concerned): pushing a branch can be done over sftp, pulling a branch can be done over http. The server does not need to know anything about Bazaar. For instance. You have a server on which you have ssh access and a web page (e.g. at school).

Basics

You can create a new repository with a cpp file in it:

Notice the .bzr directory where Bazaar will keep information about this repository.

Then, you’ll want to host this branch on your remote server. You do that by pushing your branch:

If mybzrdir is accessible from the web, people can now checkout (bzr calls it branching) from your repository:

There you go. You have a local branch of your remote repository (the server branch). You can work in it, even commit changes (bzr ci) and eventually, diff from the original branch and send the patch to the owner or, if you have access to the server branch, push it back with your local changes.

Identifying yourself

Since Bazaar works anonymously, you’ll want to identify yourself when you make changes to the branches. This is slightly different from most other revision control tools that I’ve used where you have an explicit login which is used both for access and identification. Anonymous access with the other tools that I’ve used meant you had a dead branch. You could still updated it, but you could not commit your changes. With Bazaar, you can work in your local branch, even if it was checked out anonymously.

When you are about to commit changes, you use the “whoami” command to tell who you are:

By default, whoami will try to use the name associated with your login. This is usually fine, but the email it will guess is most likely not the one you want to use (e.g. you@localhost).

Installing

Local Install on a Web Host

Here are the steps that I followed to install bzr locally (in my user directory without root access) without using gcc.

Although you do not need to install it on your server, I still wanted to. The reason being that I cannot find any decent cgi that will let me browse the content of my bzr repository from the web. The easiest way is to install bzr and have it used by a script query and stat your repository from your web page.

So again, you do not need to install bzr on the server (for me, that was the whole point of using Bazaar in the first place). Still here’s how I got it to install:

1. Log on to Your Server

2. Get the Source

The source code is available from theBazaar Download page at http://bazaar-vcs.org/Download. Under “Source of the stable release for any platform”, you’ll find a link to the source code:

3. Compile the Source Locally Without gcc

My server does not give me access to gcc (they don’t really want me to start programming on the web server, I guess installing custom software, even locally, is borderline…).

Usually, to install locally (in $HOME), you’d simply run the following command:

But in this case, I ended up with

Since gcc cannot be used, we’ll have to run the “slower” python implementation. This was achieved by adding the suggested arguments:

This compiled and installed successfully.

4. Set the PYTHONPATH Environment Variable

Running “bzr” from the command line, I’d get the following error:

All you need to do is add the path to your local python libraries to the PYTHONPATH environment variable. This can be done in your .bashrc by adding an export directive

(in your case, it might be at some other place than lib64, check it up)

Or, simply define the variable when you execute bzr:

Installing on Mac OS X

I used fink to install bzr on mac:

I did not install bzr-py26 becase paramiko, which is used by bzr for for ssh connections, was not available (at the time of this writing) for python 2.6.

Installing on Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, it was relatively painless to install: