In the past year I've discovered two things:

• The revision management system Bazaar (aka "bzr") is an occasionally flaky little thing and I've experienced several crashes doing mundane tasks. I much prefer using Git or even Subversion as they've proven to be rock solid in my use of them over the years.
• The Drupal fork Pressflow has a lot going for it.

However, because Pressflow uses Bazaar rather than Git I've been reluctant to bother trying it. Now that I'm working somewhere that is starting to use Pressflow for production sites I figured it was time to get over the headaches and start contributing.

As my first step towards this goal I've set up what I'm intending to be a semi-permanent mirror of Pressflow-6 on GitHub. While there were two existing mirrors neither of them had been updated yet, so now at least there is an up-to-date mirror of it available. In doing this I am committing to keeping this current for as long as I am using Drupal 6 for work, which should continue through 2011 and probably longer.

I'm also going to see if I can get involved a bit more with the Pressflow group, possibly throw some ideas learned during my days at Bonnier to help improve Drupal 6's performance for high-traffic sites, especially for logged-in users.

One of the most common uses of Pressflow is as part of the larger Pantheon Mercury project, which is a custom OS configuration for making installations of Linux tailored specially for running Pressflow, complete with a reverse-proxy engine and a local install of the Solr search engine. At Bluespark Labs we're standardizing on using this as the basis for all new production installations so it's in my best interests to know how it works and, potentially, contribute to the effort. So, like with Pressflow, my first step towards this is to create a GitHub mirror of the Pantheon project, which I'll try to keep current.

Update: You can also access the repository using Subversion, which can be useful to e.g. use svn:externals to save some steps when updating:

• svn checkout http://svn.github.com/damienmckenna/pressflow-6.git

Update x2: FourKitchens, one of the leaders in the Pressflow group, have announced their own official git and svn mirrors of the bzr repository:

• http://fourkitchens.com/pressflow-makes-drupal-scale/downloads