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Linus Tries Out BitKeeper
Flammon writes: "Linus has been overloaded
with patches for a while and recently the issue started to become hot again. In an unprecedented move, Linus has started using BitKeeper, as reported by Linux Today. The benefits of BitKeeper are already showing from the large amount of detail provided in the latest unstable kernel pre-release." eirikref adds: "Read Linus' own statement and take a look at the BK web interface."
IIRC, the PPC Kernel is maintained through BitKeeper, and has been for quite some time.
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
Isn't BitKeeper a (gasp!) closed-source commercial software?
... TUX, Episode I: The revenge of the Borg!!
Shock! Horror! Has Linus Torvalds turned to the dark side of the code?!?!
Stay tuned for the next episode of
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Methinks that it wouldn't be trivial to continue to pipe the results in a terse format as well.
For L-K and releases a terse format is appropriate, but I think that keeping the longer ones around somewhere can help some of us newbies understand what the heck is going on in there.
Wouldn't you think that, in the 10 or so years he's been maintaining the kernel, he already evaluated it? Just because there was never a press release doesn't mean he rejected CVS out of hand and has never tinkered with it in his spare time.
Now I'm confused!
I've been using CVS for years and read with great interest the recent Linux Journal article about the Subversion project to created a CVS replacement that is better than CVS.
Then I see a Slashdot story about arch.
Now, my FearLessLeader starts using Bitkeeper.
Should I move from CVS and, if so, which is best?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
personable? Theo? Good God! he's like a living godzilla spewing white hot embers of death everywhere...
not that i don't love the OpenBSD project (i have several machines running it), but to say that Theo is personable is like saying everyone needs a porcupine to snuggle up with at night.
Bitkeeper is available under two licenses. The commercial license costs money and comes with support. The non-commercial license does not cost money., but it has a requirement that all your ChangeLogs must be sent to a world-readable server controlled by BitMover.
Bitkeeper source is available, but it's illegal to redistribute a version of Bitkeeper with the mandatory open logging stripped out.
Bitmover Inc. wants to avoid the situation where people use bitkeeper like gcc, taking free software tools but not giving anything back. You can pay Bitmover money, or you can use a free-as-in-beer version that is suitable for software libre and unsuitable for closed-source software.
I use CVS all the time, but I know its limitations. Linus was right when he decided not to use CVS, it simply is not reliable enough. But don't blame CVS, it is a good and useful tool; but every tool has its safe zone of "recommended use", and Linux kernel is way beyond that. I say, any project above 50 KLOCs and with 100 revisions on average would be pushing the limits.
Well, at least he runs Linux...
Can it really be a bad thing to have too much information about any changes?
Yes, when the information is so detailed that you can't cut through the BS to find the meat. Some people just want a brief list to skim in order to decide if it's worth downloading or not.
----- rL
http://bitkeeper.com/Products.Comparisons.Perforce .html
Allthough this is marketing poop so it should be taken with a fine grain of salt, it might answer your question.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
In other news, demons all over Hell were seen lacing up their skates for the upcoming hockey match against the U.S. National team.
That is fine; but the most important problems would be absence of changesets (so you can't undo related groups of patches), and absence of tiered repositories (everyone goes to the same, single, central CVS server). It all can work, and it does work as we know, but the more code you write the more difficult the maintenance becomes. Like it or not, CVS is an old software, unchanged for years and full of kludges, and BK is one of new designs.
Hopefully they don't keep the repository on the same machine that hosts their website...
/.'ed the kernel!
We may have
"It's his friggin' hobby, after all. If people don't like the way he deals with it, maybe they ought to go work for a more personable coder on another OS, like, say, Theo De Raadt."
Um, except that NOBODY WORKS FOR LINUS! Linux isn't Linus's ball anymore to take away when he doesn't like how people are playing the game. That said, I think he's been a wonderful leader and manager, and is obviously opening up to suggestions. But it is stupid and insulting to say that people who aren't satisfied with Linus's management should just suck it and pick another OS. Linus himself would tell you that Linux is more the community's than his.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I must say, I *LIKE* all the detail in the changelog now. For a LONG time, I've thought the changelogs for linux have been too understated.
... X hardware, X version, etc"
'More bug fixes for PCMCIA' or 'Patches for USB'. Doesnt really tell me if theres any hope a particular problem I am experiencing with either has been fixed -- nor does it tell me why something that used to work no longer works, and how to re-enable the 'old style' code -- or where I should look for the diff to say to the author "This used to work, since this change, it doesnt anymore
More detail means, for example, I can see from the changelog, when the USB sleep (ie. usb does not come back online automatically when you put your computer sleep, you must either do some fancy footwork beforehand (which doesnt always work), or reboot). Its a known problem, but "More USB bugfixes" doesnt tell me its fixed, or even that that part of the code has been worked on.
I'm sure theres many others out there who experience problems in specific parts of the code, (which are known problems), and have been frustrated by the changelog's lack of detail -- and dont want to upgrade your kernel to 2.5, or 2.4-pre's or even another stable 2.4, unless you know your problem is fixed, because what you got now works for everything ELSE, and you never know what a new kernel will break. I myself havnt started using 2.5 kernels, but I would probably start IF I could tell by the changelog, that my problem was solved there, so there was some benefit for me.
There's a point where a kernel development becomes a little more than a hobby. I would have to say Linus has crossed that line long ago. He may or may not recieve DIRECT monetary incentives to keep up the good work, but regardless, the line is crossed. It's now a profession. Linus is a professional Linux developer. Until he takes a professional position that does not allow him to spend as much time on kernel development, it's his profession, and as such no longer a hobby.
The Free Software movement says, "Use the software that's the most free. If you still have a choice, use the best software."
The Open Source Software movement says, "Use the best software. That will often be Free / Open Source software."
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I am very thankful that Linus finally "saw the light" and started using a source code control system.
:)
I really like the new change logs, I have always hated the old change logs as being too uninformative. One of the really interesting things for me about a source code control system is that it preserves a lot more of the history of the source code than the tar balls do.
It is also really cool how it branches the source for every patch and checks in the code with the users name as the one who checked it in and the body of the email as the comment. If Linus can find a way to also check in his rejected comments on a patch then that will also be very useful. It would be interesting to capture a little bit of the why instead of just the how in the kernel development process.
To apply a patch you just have to merge the branch that contains the patch back into the main development branch, fix any conflicts, compile, fix it so it works right and then commit.
And Linus will never lose another patch again, they will be saved for all time in the source tree under a seperate branch.
Once Linux lets his inner sanctum of kernel developers all start merging approved patches into his main branch then we will see the kernel development really speed up.
Thanks!
-- Never make a general statement.
Maybe they did it to force you to decide if you want to be part of the Free Software/Open Source community or not. It's annoying to me as well when I can't have my cake and eat it too, but I don't complain about the people that make cakes :)
It's just like the GPL - the license is a means to form and defend the community for the good of the community. If you don't like it, that's OK too, but don't say that those community-maintaining features are the problem. They're a feature, not a bug.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
There are lots of ways of providing such hooks. Perhaps the most compatible with the Linux kernel mindset would be something similar to Emacs-hooks: replace most kernel functions with variables holding function pointers to the actual code and provide APIs for manipulating those hooks.
I found very interesting a document from Jack Moffitt (of xiph.org fame,
u blic/critique.html
l
one of the main Ogg developers and one of the Icecast Core Developers),
about some problems he had with the BK license when he was using it
for hosting Icecast:
"A Critique of the BitKeeper License"
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/x/i/xiphmont/P
You might also find interesting his post on the matter to the
"Icecast Developer Discussion List":
http://www.xiph.org/archives/icecast-dev/0067.htm
I hope that he will post here his his experience using BK
in an Open/Free-source project...
Best regards
\\Uriel
P.S.: Yea, I know I'm karma whoring, but I'm sure many people will find this interesting,
specially in casse Jack dont post to this history latter
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
How does Linus using BitKeeper make kernel development harder for those who don't have it (can't afford, won't use non-free software, whatever)?
Linus and the maintainers will still accept patches in email, so nothing's changed except Linus now has a tool that is likely to help him keep up the extremely high productivity.
And, using non-free software to manage the development of free software doesn't make the free software any less free. It's not like it could only be compiled by a non-free compiler.
Maybe this means that those who write free software will next write a tool even better than BitKeeper and the world will be once more a little better place.
I did a superficial investigation on source control systems, and found some very interesting really free ones, like Aægis.
Does someone know if free alternatives to BK were considered, and if so why a semi-free one was choosen? If BK was better, specifically how it compared to Aægis and other alternatives?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I have yet to see a major new device class, file system class, or other subsystem that didn't require patching. That's a problem with the Linux kernel--it simply lacks the hooks and mechanisms for doing this. And it will only get addressed if the kernel developers start making a commitment to shipping drivers and other modules separately from the main kernel, with their own version numbers and source trees. As long as people can patch easily, they are never going to add the hooks to the kernel that will let new functionality get added without patching.
> It's somewhat sad that Linux,
Why? I find it interesting.
There's is absolutely NOTHING wrong with charging for software. If you do nothing but write software for work, you have a reasonable expectation to make a living off it. The world doesn't run off charity man, nothing is free.
To me, the "pearl of Free Software" being version controlled by a commercial product is a grand statement.. that free software and commercial software can coexist peacefully.
Software "should" only be free as in speech anyways. If it's simultaneously free beer that's just icing on the cake.
From Linus' email, mentioned above:
Basically, I'm aiming to be able to accept patches directly from email,
Does Linus use PGP sigs (for example) to verify the senders of these patches? I hope he does (being Linus and all that).
The argument that some people will use is
to say "See? Free software isn't viable on it own. The only reason it's any good at all is that is relies on commercial software"
Or the more subtle "Sure, Linux was okay before. But it only got good once they started using commercial software to develop it"
It could help reinforce the stereotype of free software as "hobby" projects - "Oh sure, you can use free software tools to develop some simple CGI script or napster clone, but if you want to make a serious software project, you need to use commercial tools"
(Not that I believe this, but that is what might be argued)
No,
if you read the recent thread on l-k, it's because in private Linus has been talking for quite a while to the bitkeeper people about what he wanted from bitkeeper before he'd use it, and the bitkeeper people have gone and implemented most of it, so Linus agreed to use it for a while.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I also used to think like this. The sum extent of my source control was cp -r currrent vX.x. Source control was for wimps.
I'm of a rather different view today. I now utterly insist on using it, even in tiny little things that I think are one-offs at the time (quite often it turns out they aren't).
I think I can understand Linus' dislike. It sounds like you're less free, and as if the whole coding thing is suddenly less enjoyable. However, having gone through exactly the same feelings I can say that in my case it certainly isn't true that things are less enjoyable. In fact, in some ways it's easier as I can go wandering off in my own direction for a while, before hitting a dead end and backtracking safe in the knowledge that I have a defined state to fall back on should I need to.
Personally, I'd recommend taking the plunge. Some systems are better than others, but any system use injects a bit more organisation and confidence into the process of coding.
Cheers,
Ian
Will there be public read-only access to Linus' branch so people can keep up with the latest?
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Linus has finally moved from chaos to order. One of the major complaints about the Linux VS BSD development model (a lack of a control system) has been fixed.
Now, to address what this means for Bitkeeper.....its death. Yes. Bitkeeper is now doomed. Why? Simple. The "keep this in the GPL family" movement will have someone clone the Bitkeeper method of software management, and a GPLed Bitkeeper clone will be created, it will catch up to Bitkeeper, pass it, and then Bitkeeper will have its oxygen cut off, and they will die.
Tell that to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, XFree86,
all of which are orders of magnitude larger than the linux kernel. All of them have been using CVS for the past 8-10 years (depending on how you count things). Sure, cvs has its limitations, but the Linux kernel with its small number of developers with write access isn't pushing the limits. FreeBSD has over 250 people committing to its tree right now, for example.