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BitMover Releases Open Source BitKeeper Client

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the bits-a-shakin dept.

diegocgteleline.es writes "Larry McVoy, the owner of BitKeeper (also one of the guys behind LMbench) has posted a message to linux-kernel where he announces a open source client of BitKeeper, which would only allow synching against BK trees. It looks like it's licensed under the NWL (No Whining License) that will force you to 'not whine about this product or any other products from BitMover, Inc.'"

7 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Bazaar-NG by Cronopios · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Too late.

    Right know, I put my expectations on Bazaar-NG: all the goodies of GNU Arch and the simple interface of Subversion. Developed by Canonical (of Ubuntu fame).

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    1. Re:Bazaar-NG by millette · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Maybe you'd prefer a haskell implementation ? Darcs is decentralized, based on a "theory of patches" with roots in quantum mechanics.

      Written in Haskell, darcs is used on many operating systems including Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, and Windows. Darcs includes a CGI script to browse your repository from the web.

  2. Re:Strange by Chasuk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't know how relevant this is, not quite getting the gist of the article, but does this sentence (linked from the word message in the article) make any difference? Or was I not supposed to follow any of the links?

    Don't worry about the license, it's a joke. BSD license OK with everyone?

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  3. Open alternatives by ballermann · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are so much real open alternatives like subversion, arch and (my personal favourite) darcs - just to name a few. Why bother with bitkeeper?

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  4. I wonder how this bitkeeper thing compares by melted · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder how this bitkeeper thing compares to the state of the art, Perforce. Perforce charges $700 per seat, and after working with it for years, I can say it's worth it. Everything is just the way it should be. I wish someone would reimplement the damn thing under GPL license. After using Perforce at work, all other systems look like a joke.

    1. Re:I wonder how this bitkeeper thing compares by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For example, within RedHat, they can have one (or many) child branches from Linus's branch (or any other developer's branches); and "reparent" the branches as needed to merge in the various pieces they need. Other employes' repositories may point to one inside RedHat; or they may point to Linus's; and of course they can "reparent" their repository to switch between the two as needed.

      How would you know, Mr. Anonymous Coward? The fact is, very few employees at Red Hat use Bitkeeper at all. I should know, I work there. Of the handful that do use BitKeeper, most are maintainers for whom BitKeeper is the route of least resistance. They would all probably switch if Linus switched. The vast majority of Red Hat developers do not use BitKeeper and would violently object to using BitKeeper on any project. This is because of the silly license, and because of a rather natural distrust of closed source tools in the open source toolchain, which BitMover has done their level best to confirm.

      By the way, it's Red Hat, not RedHat.

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  5. Re:Bitkeeper website by greppling · · Score: 3, Interesting
    This has been quoted so many times, I still think it is a silly exaggeration. A couple of things changed when Linus switched to BK:

    1. He wrote scripts so that he didn't have to jump between applying patches and reading e-mail, instead he is now reading a batch of patches, queuing them, and then starts a script to apply them.
    2. Developers have instant access to Linus' tree. Any source control system would have provided this.
    3. The comments to the patches in the e-mails sent to Linus now actually make it to the public. Just about any GNU project does this via ChangeLog under any revision control system.
    4. A script was written to automatically extract release notes from the changelog comments.
    5. Merging with subsystems maintainer is easier if they pile up the patches in bitkeeper repositories.

    Maybe all of the above together yielded a factor of two. But only with respect to 5. is BK at all relevant. And even there -- by a HUGE amount the largest merge point is Andrew Morton, who uses quilt instead of BK to manage his tree with some hundred patches per week throughput to Linus. And I haven't read any complaints from Linus that he isn't using BK.