Bazaar is a distributed version control system, and as such one of the most powerful version control tools that exists today. At the same time, it is friendly, flexible, consistent, and easy to learn. It can be used effectively from very small solo projects, to very large distributed projects, and everything else in between.

Bazaar is written in Python, it is open source and completely free, and is an official GNU project, licensed under GPLv2. It is sponsored by Canonical, and used by many large projects, such as the Ubuntu operating system, Launchpad, MySQL, OpenStack, Inkscape, and many others. The official website for hosting Bazaar projects is Launchpad (http://launchpad.net/), where you can find many interesting projects that use Bazaar.

This book will explain how to make the most out of version control, and how to accomplish all the features outlined earlier with Bazaar and much more. The next chapters will explain how to use Bazaar in increasingly advanced use cases. Each scenario will build on the previous one, gradually revealing the added benefits of each increasingly sophisticated setup, and how they will improve your productivity, whether you are working solo or as part of a large team.