I've just put together an installer for Wildcat BZR on Windows. This includes everything that is required to run the application - no previous installations of Bazaar or any other python-related things are required.

wildcatbzr.exe MD5: 32c87c37a11f27a8834f6e98b7125f87

Tonight I did some work on Wildcat BZR's diff and merge preferences. The preferences dialog now has a list of diff and merge tools that it know about, and can be chosen from a drop down list. Additional diff and merge tools can be supported by specifying the executable and what parameters must be supplied for diffing and merging operations.

At the moment, the following tools are know about, and I will be expanding this list when I have more spare time:

1. SourceGear DiffMerge
2. KDiff3
3. Apple opendiff

A brief Wildcat BZR update...

Today I fixed the branch dialog in Wildcat BZR which was displaying correctly on OS X but not on Windows and Linux. Here is what it looks like now, running on Ubuntu:

The source of Wildcat BZR is now available on Launchpad and there is a homepage which has a list of features, screenshots and a roadmap. It has been tested on Windows XP and OS X. It should also work on Linux. The external diff and merge support is somewhat limited at the moment. Everything is explained on the project page.

I have re-worked the algorithm for reading the directory structure and Bazaar status of files in Wildcat BZR, and verified that it works correctly on Windows XP:

I started writing a Bazaar client this weekend. After two days, here's what I've got:

Currently supported features are:

• Init
• Commit
• Add
• Pull
• Merge
• Push
• Commit
• Merge using an external merge tool

I've only tested it on OS X at the moment, but it should be able to work on any platform that supports wxWidgets (Linux, Windows, Mac, etc). There are a few things I want to clean up in the application before I release a 0.1 version on the Internet:

• Dialogs like the commit and add ones need their layout made nicer
• At the moment, only Apple's FileMerge is supported as an external merge tool. I plan on getting SourceGear's DiffMerge working as well.
• I need to add diffing and history support
• I need to change the way it walks the directory tree, as it's slow with large projects

This evening, I placed all of sorn.net under version control, using Bazaar. It was for three reasons:

1. I couldn't believe I'd not done this before
2. I wanted to see how Bazaar would handle a project of this size (206mb working tree)
3. It should hopefully make updating the site much simpler, as I simply push changes over SSH using Bazaar.

I've retrieved all of the older blog posts from the bBlog database they were in, and added them into the new blog, so everything should be back on track now.

Today I wrote a Bazaar plugin for CruiseControl.NET. Having Bazaar work with our continuous integration system was the next step in evaluating it as a Subversion replacement. The plugin was simple to write, and is available on Launchpad.

Last week, I set up the Bazaar version control system on Solaris 9. I installed the following packages:

• python-2.5.1
• pycrypto-2.0.1
• paramiko-1.7.1
• bzr-0.90

I got the Python package from the Sun Freeware site, and installed it using pkgadd. The two python modules - pycrypto and paramiko - were installed using these commands:

python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

Bazaar, being written in python, was also installed using the setup.py script. I discovered a small problem when building Bazaar on Solaris 9: _dirstate_helpers_c.h attempts to #include stdint.h, which doesn't exist and results in a "No such file or directory" error. To get around this problem, I changed that line to include <sys/types.h> instead. Building Bazaar after that went smoothly.

When using Bazaar on Solaris 9, make sure that /usr/local/lib is in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

I set up the Bazaar distributed version control system on three machines today (two Macs and one Debian), after Kevin mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Iplayed around with merging and branching - it seems pretty similar to Git, and I'm not sure what all of the advantages and disadvantages are. Git seems marginally faster, but Bazaar seems to be simpler to install on different platforms (it has a native Windows version, and doesn't need Cygwin like Git does). On OS X and Linux, Bazaar's installation was as simple as Git's.

To get SSH support in Bazaar, it needs the pycrypto and paramiko Python libraries installed. They're available from Debian's repository, but on OS X, I had to install them manually.

I plan on using Bazaar for Wildcat COBOL's version control, so I'll be able to give a more detailed account of how good I think it is and compare it to Subversion later.