Exaile recently switched from Bazaar to Git. Dustin Spicuzza, who has been leading the Exaile project recently, initiated this plan and the rest of the team were in full agreement. But why did we switch? Put simply, it was because all of us prefer Git to Bazaar. However, that’s an oversimplification of my stance on the whole DVCS thing.

After the BitKeeper debacle, distributed version control system became the hottest buzzword around, and in a short while the three major contenders became obvious: Bazaar, Git, and Mercurial. At the time I already had experience with SVK (a semi-DVCS that extends Subversion), which I had used on Ruby.NET and Exaile, but when Adam moved Exaile to Bazaar, I went all-in on Bazaar.

I loved nearly everything about Bazaar, and I instantly “got” it. This was in contrast to Mercurial, which I gave up trying to understand, and to Git, which I wouldn’t have started using if I didn’t have to use it at work. I really wanted Bazaar to be popular. I still agree with the general sentiment that it has excellent usability, especially compared to Git.

But its modest popularity crashed under Git’s dominance; Git was getting all the attention and all the improvements while Bazaar stagnated. Bazaar’s biggest promise from the start, that it would eventually be optimised for speed, either came too late or never materialised—I still don’t know which. Its code documentation languished, and I had to go digging around just to write a simple commit bot.

During casual chat among the active developers at #exaile, we found that our collective knowledge of Bazaar had deteriorated so much that we couldn’t remember how to perform some relatively simple operations. We decided to move on. Right now most of our services have moved to GitHub. We’re still keeping the Launchpad site to refer to old bugs and for the web translation service (the latter is not available on GitHub).

Note: I wrote this article in full in 2014 but only decided to publish it in 2019, by which time it was obviously not timely anymore. It still expresses my thoughts quite well, so I’m publishing it belatedly, but backdated in order to not confuse people.