Seeing the origin of content

When two or more people are working on files, it can be highly useful at times to see who created or last changed certain content. To do this, using the annotate command like this:

bzr annotate readme.txt

If you are a pessimist or an optimist, you might prefer to use one of built-in aliases for annotate: blame or praise. Either way, this displays each line of the file together with information such as:

• who changed it last
• when it was last changed
• the commit message.

GUI tools

The various GUI plugins for Bazaar provide graphical tools for viewing annotation information. For example, the bzr-gtk plugin provides a GUI tool for this that can be launched using the gannotate command:

bzr gannotate readme.txt

The GUI tools typically provide a much richer display of interesting information (e.g. all the changes in each commit) so you may prefer them over the text-based command.