The other day I decided I wanted to try out one of the more modern revision control systems. I decided on bzr as it seemed to have some features that I liked the look of. I still intend to try out darcs one day though, as it looks very interesting.
Just as I started looking at it and thinking about using it for some of my packaging work, I discovered that there was no -buildpackage for bzr. But lo, madduck filed an ITP for it. However he said that it didn't actually exist yet.
I decided I would try and help to write something, even though I have hardly ever touched Python before. It was quite easy to hack something together by looking in examples. I ended up with a plugin that worked for me to build simple packages from a bzr repository, including supporting the layout where just the debian/ dir is versioned (the mergeWithUpstream of svn-buildpackage). You can find my work here, (in a bzr branch of course). The plugin is actually called builddeb, as it seems Fedora are keen on something similar, and so we didn't want to hog the namespace. The Debian package will probably include a wrapper script named bzr-buildpackage though.
There is plenty that can be added on, for instance config files are needed, and madduck would like to include hook script capability within the branches, but this is going to take some careful thought.
I have quite enjoyed working in Python, it allows you to do things "properly" if you want, but also can be very terse. I've not grasped all of the features yet though.