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Bitkeeper News Redux
gosand writes "Newsforge is running Part 1 of a two-part interview with Bitkeeper author Larry McVoy. You may recall that there was quite an uproar in the community over Linus choosing to use a proprietary source management tool. Although there are no hard numbers, the estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK."
What we did to arrive at that number was to simply measure the amount of change over the two-year period in BitKeeper and contrast that with the two-year period before BitKeeper. It worked out to about 2.5x more change.
I'm no mathematician but I'd say that's a decent way of estimating their productivity increase. But does BitKeeper actually help that much? Anyone who has every used it in a production environment please comment.
Linus is processing around 50 patches a day, 365 days a year.
That's a pretty incredible number. If that's the truth, then I'm very impressed.
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Although there are no hard numbers, the estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK.
And I'm 1000x more productive with CVS!
Instead of pulling numbers out of the air, just say the guy likes the tool and performs better with it. Sheesh.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
In one day Linus can hammer out the code that used to take him 2 work weeks? Give me a break.
...You may recall that there was quite an uproar in the community over Linus choosing to use a proprietary source management tool. Although there are no hard numbers, the estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK...
No interest whatsoever in being a flamebait here so...
Though no hard numbers exist and this is largely speculative all around, one would have to applaud Linus for using any tool that is making him 10x more productive.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
There's only one small problem with measuring things that way. Things basically are more complicated during the second-two years, therby generating more work. So how much is Bitkeepers doing, and how much is simply more work comming in?
Why there was an uproar over this. Who cares if it's Free or not? It gets the job done better, and in the end that's what counts. The flame wars all over LKML and other places were just wastes of time.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
The lesson to be learned here is very simple...
Open source and propriety software can and should be used hand in hand. The best tool for the job etc. etc. The OSS scene suffers from the idea they are members of some religion and by using anything other then Open Source they are committing a crime against the movement.
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
"...the estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK." Does that mean we have a new unit of measurement for benchmarking?
Actually, it's meaningless without looking at other factors. Even the concept of more change is so open ended it tells us nothing. As Linux gains users it will certainly increase in these numbers, there is no strong indication that bitkeeper is a factor at all, or how much of a factor it is.
Although there are no hard numbers, the estimates are that Linus has been 10x more productive with BK.
Following the statement that there are no hard numbers , the ten percent figure seems more like a number pulled out of thin air and selected to not be large enough to be called outrageous but big enough to encourage people to make a change. That's not to say we are not talking about a good tool here (I have no opnion on that issue), but this is much more hype than a valid study.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
With no hard numbers the 10x number is absurd. I misread it as 10%, and even that number seemed hard to justify since all factors were not considered. 10x is an outrageous claim, and would imply that Linus previously spent almost all his time not doing programming.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
We derive benefit from the pro bono work in other ways as well. When we are testing out a new release we can put it on bkbits.net and we know in seconds if we have broken something important; people use old versions of BK to talk to bkbits.net every few seconds.
Perhaps having the repository where Linux and other projects are hosted being broken to older clients now and then is a bad thing for a community (though the bk people obviously see it as positive for them - free testing). I understand they're providing everything for free, but perhaps Linux might be better off on a community-supported service (still running Bitkeeper) that is concerned a bit more production status?
I'm not intimately familiar with this, so it's just my two cents, feel free to argue.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Folks -- the 10x productivity number mentioned in the article was only an anecdotal claim; Larry McVoy claimed 2x. And the latter number is backed up by some pretty fair reasoning. I RTFA and didn't get the impression anyone was pulling numbers out of their ass.
S
Unlike a lot of you, Linus isn't a Linux zealot. He's said on more than one occasion that Linux/OSS is about making the right tool for the job when one doesn't already exist. It has nothing to do with shoving an ideology down everyone's throat.
In this case, Linus decided that Bitkeeper was the best tool for the job, and it is very telling that people are judging him for not complying with an almost religious ideology that he doesn't even subscribe to.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
There has been a noticable improvement in the 2.5-2.6 cycle compared to 2.3-2.4. Linus and the team has done a super job. Bitkeeper gets a lot of credit for it. I can't help but wonder if similar results would not have been achieved with CVS, Subversion, or arch. Are there any features Bitkeeper has that the free alternatives do not?
The GCC project is of comparable complexity to Linux. They use CVS with some success, don't they?
an ill wind that blows no good
And for the rest of us who enjoy using free software, there's the Subversion (also known as SVN) revision control system.
The article makes some moot points comparing BitKeeper to CVS - since I'm fairly sure anybody who's tried SVN would never want to go back to CVS. I now recoil in disgust whenever I have to access a CVS database - SVN's implementation solves problems in a much cleaner way than CVS and has far fewer rough edges.
IIRC he was not using any SCM at all so yes using one in gneral will help. CVS for me was able to get my team about 10x better (but then again I did most of the work anyways and this was for class).
But anything not using a SCM will be helped by using one.
"When we are testing out a new release we can put it on bkbits.net and we know in seconds if we have broken something important; people use old versions of BK to talk to bkbits.net every few seconds."
I'm sure they're experts in code management, but their testing procedures could use some work.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Idealism is nice and all but it doesn't get shit done.
He reviews the much of the changes that are going in, and he has designed some of the larger changes, but the bulk of the programming is done by others. This is why comparing the rate of the merging of patches makes sense in the first place, that is mostly what Linus does.
Just from following the kernel development from the outside it is obvious that things have been working much more smoothly after Linus started using bitkeeper than it has in a long time. In the past there has been several periods where the tension has gotten very high mostly because large number of patches has been dropped by Linus without explanation. Lately this seems to have been no problem at all. And this has happened when the rate of the patches going into the kernel has increased significantly.
There may be other reasons for this too, ofcourse. Things I can think of is that the cooperation with the "kernel lieutenants" has been working better. In particular Andrew Morton seems to do a remarkable good job. And, the fact that Linus now is working full time on Linux probably also helps.
This seems like just another example where the Free/OSS model has failed.
There are many FOSS alternatives to Bitkeeper such as CVS, Subversion, and arch. And none of them come close to the productivity of this one commercial package.
Why is this? Sure, we've got peer review, no deadline/bottom-line pressure, but we still get outdone. Where is Eric Raymond's bazaar now?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong believer in OSS, and occasionally contribute, but there are still areas where we are sorely lacking.
When was the last time you saw a decent FOSS fps game? Crystal Space looks promising, but it's just an engine. Look at Tux Racer, another example of FOSS failure. The game was forked when the original developer decided to go closed source, and the GPL'd OpenRacer project was started. Today the closed-source TuxRacer is a rather beautiful full-featured game, and the FOSS version hasn't progressed beyond a novelty.
Then we get to see Blender, a shining example of when FOSS developers adopt a formerly closed-source project and do it right.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The GCC project is of comparable complexity to Linux. They use CVS with some success, don't they?
The FreeBSD project also uses CVS for development. Keep in mind that FreeBSD is a kernel AND an userland, which might qualify it to be an even more complex project to manage than Linux.
And on a lesser scale, there is also the example of the Mozilla project which uses CVS with a good share of success.