~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev

Introduction

============

Welcome to the Bazaar Version Control System's guide for system

administrators.  Bazaar is a flexible system that provides many possible

options for serving projects in ways that will hopefully meet your needs.  If

you have requirements that are not met by the current state of the Bazaar

ecosystem, please let us know at bazaar@lists.canonical.com or on Launchpad at

https://launchpad.net/bzr.

Scope of this guide

-------------------

In this guide, we will discuss various techniques for making Bazaar projects

available, migrating from other Version Control Systems, browsing code over

the Web and combining Bazaar with other tools.  In many of these categories,

multiple options exist and we will try to explains the costs and benefits of

the various options.

The intended audience for this guide is the individuals who administer the

computers that will do the serving.  Much of the configuration that we will

discuss requires administrator privileges and we will not necessarily indicate

every point that those privileges are needed.  That said, reading this guide

can also be very helpful for those who are interested in communicating to the

system administrators about the requirements for making full use of Bazaar.

What you need to run a Bazaar server

------------------------------------

Where possible, we will discuss both Unix (including GNU/Linux) and Windows server

environments.  For the purposes of this document, we will consider Mac OS X as

a type of Unix.

In general, Bazaar requires only Python_ 2.4 or greater and the cElementTree_

package (included in Python 2.5 and later) to run.  If you would *optionally*

like to be able to access branches using SFTP, you need `paramiko and

pycrypto`_.

.. _Python: http://www.python.org/

.. _cElementTree: http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm

.. _paramiko and pycrypto: http://www.lag.net/paramiko/

For maximum performance, Bazaar can make use of compiled versions of some

critical components of the code.  Pure Python alternatives exist for all of

these components, but they may be considerably slower.  To compile these

extensions, you need a C compiler and the relevant header files from the

Python package.  On GNU/Linux, these may be in a separate package.  Other

operating systems should have the required headers installed by default.

If you are installing a development version of Bazaar, rather than a released

version, you will need Pyrex_ to create the C extensions.  The release

tarballs already have the Pyrex-created C files.

.. _Pyrex: http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex/