I was entirely happy to happy to announce a new version of Tarmac, 0.3. In fact, I was so happy that I went again and immediately did another release of Tarmac, Tarmac 0.3.1. Tarmac 0.3.x series brings a whole slew of fixes, including fixing more than half of the bugs filed against Tarmac. In fact, there are no more bugs with a higher importance than Low currently (ideally, people use the software and find more for me to work on).

Tarmac is a tool for automatically landing branches that have been approved for merge through the Launchpad code review system. It uses the Launchpad API to find these branches, and has a variety of features to automate their merge and management.

Tarmac 0.3 is also a complete re-write of most of the system. Notably, this means that Tarmac can be used on branches that aren't the development focus. I'm sure this will make Ted Gould happy, but the real reason I did this was help in the managing of all those official source package branches on Launchpad.

The Plugin architecture has also been reworked a bit as well. Since I spent so much time writing documentation for Tarmac, I realized how icky it was to write plugins. If you have plugins from 0.2, you'll need to port them to 0.3. You'll also need to port your configuration to Tarmac 0.3.x, since the configuration has changed a bit.

The final big thing to notice is that Tarmac is getting entirely more entwined with bzrlib (because it's such an awesome library even outside of bzr) by stealing it's command code. Tarmac is only one script now, and the first argument is the actual command.

You can find Tarmac 0.3.1 here. I'm working on packaging it now (although I'm really slow packaging, mentoring desired).

Recently, my workflow with Bazaar has adapted to use bzr-pipeline, because much of the work I'm doing is based upon prerequisite branches. This means I find myself doing a lot of switching between pipes, sending pipes to Launchpad for review, etc. I have added the following aliases to ~/.bazaar/bazaar.conf in order to make my life easier.

next = switch-pipe :next
prev = switch-pipe :prev
send-pipe = send -r branch::prev..
diff-pipe = diff -r branch::prev
pipes = show-pipeline

Also, if you haven't used bzr-pipeline yet, try it out next time you're trying to break your work up into many smaller branches.

Want to hack on Tarmac? Want to learn how to use the Launchpad API (or want to use your existing knowledge)? Want to learn to use bzr's functionality programmatically? There is a Tarmac mini-sprint scheduled for Friday, 10 Jul 2009 in #tarmac on Freenode. Tarmac 0.2 will also be released this weekend based on the work completed on Tarmac on Friday.

Also, if you'd like to know more about Tarmac, or would like to participate, please join the Tarmac Launchpad group and subscribe to the mailing list.