I have some experience with the Mercurial code base, which I thought was pretty well engineered. It's not PEP 8, though, so that makes it slightly idiosyncratic. Might make an interesting comparison with Bazaar, though!

In my opinion mercurial's codebase is much better than bazaar's. It's concise and to the point, uses classes when necessary and functions in other cases, following logic is usually straightforward task and it educates well. On the other hand, bazaar's codebase is a mess of hundreds of classes, relations of which are often hard to understand, they are hard to navigate and IMO it's over-engineered. Even writing a plugin for bzr is hard because there is plenty of docs which usually say nothing substantial and codebase is so hard to navigate.

Disclaimer: contributed to mercurial (and wrote some plugins), wrote few plugins for bzr (it was used in one company I worked for).

P.S. Didn't notice right away, hey, Dirkjan! :)

I haven't used Mercurial yet, let alone glance at the code base, but it might be worth a look ;-)

But honestly, the Bazaar code base is great. Great documentation at every level, and, as far as I can judge, some pretty good code too.

Thanks for that input, that is exactly what I am looking for.

Cheers!

That is actually a very cool idea, taking 2 codebases that work on the same domain and seeing the trade offs that each made.

Thank you! (And I had no idea that either bazaar or mercurial were written in Python, because them being 'serious' software I automatically assumed they were written in C. Color me stupid)

The Python standard library is hit-or-miss. Some parts are really excellent code. Other parts are horribly hacky crap from 1990 that can’t be ripped out or improved for backwards-compatibility reasons.

Thanks for that input, that is exactly what I thought it would be. My problem is that I am not able to discern the crap from good at my level.