So arch has had two major implementations: tla and bazaar. Bazaar was a fork of tla and for a while was actively maintained by Cannonical. That was until they decided that the future was in bzr. That’s their right, but it left the users with a big void. Tla was not really maintained anymore since everyone was more or less using bazaar and bzr was not nearly stable enough to put your sensitive data into. It was still changing repository format 😉
Furthermore it causes big problems for distributions when upstream just suddenly disappears. What happens when critical external libraries are updated in a non-compatible way (libneon anyone?) with no way to SLOT them.
Luckily someone has picked up tla again and it is slowly putting out releases again, but bazaar is completely dead. I tried contacting the former maintainer but he doesn’t even respond to emails anymore it seems.
I have updated my free software patches page with the patches from Gentoo. It might come in handy for other people.
So what’s the future? bzr, git? I don’t know, but I don’t have a lot of faith in Cannonical with the bazaar stunt they pulled.