Bazaar is a new version control system sponsored by Canonical, the commercial company behind Ubuntu. Unlike Subversion and CVS that only support a central repository model, Bazaar also supports distributed version control, giving people the ability to collaborate more efficiently. In particular, Bazaar is designed to maximize the level of community participation in open source projects.
At a terminal prompt, enter the following command to install bzr:
sudo apt-get install bzr
To introduce yourself to bzr, use the whoami command like this:
$ bzr whoami 'Joe Doe <joe.doe@gmail.com>'
Bazaar comes with bundled documentation installed into /usr/share/doc/bzr/html by default. The tutorial is a good place to start. The bzr command also comes with built-in help:
$ bzr help
To learn more about the foo command:
$ bzr help foo
While highly useful as a stand-alone system, Bazaar has good, optional integration with Launchpad, the collaborative development system used by Canonical and the broader open source community to manage and extend Ubuntu itself. For information on how Bazaar can be used with Launchpad to collaborate on open source projects, see http://bazaar-vcs.org/LaunchpadIntegration.
