Linus Drops BitKeeper

ravenII wrote in to mention a story running on CNet, which discusses Linus Torvald's decision to no longer use BitKeeper. From the article: "Linus Torvalds is looking for a new SCM for his project's source code after a conflict involving the current management system, BitKeeper. 'I've decided to not use BK (BitKeeper) mainly because I need to figure out the alternatives,' Torvalds said in a posting. 'Rather than continuing things as normal, I decided to bite the bullet and just see what life without BK looks like.' Coverage on the BitKeeper announcement from earlier this week is also available. Update: 04/10 16:36 GMT by Z : Updated to reflect the story's origin.

Comments

Re:Q & A SCM?

[erikharrison]

The replacement has to be roughly as performant as BK, if possible (so far, not so much), offer the distributed SCM model (several available tools) and hopefully have a stable release (less so).

GNU Arch?

[jameson]

Does anyone happen to know whether GNU Arch has been considered? I've been using it for a while and find it quite good (it's not perfect, but it's the best versionning system I've used so far).

BitKeeper Website

[dduardo]

So when are they going to remove the quote by Linus?

"BitKeeper has made me more than twice as productive, and its fundamentally distributed nature allows me to work the way I prefer to work - with many different groups working independently, yet allowing for easy merging between them." -- Linus Torvalds

Actually...

[Senjutsu]

The problem is that Linus is not elligible for bitkeeper licensing anymore.

In addition to dropping the free version, Bitmover is refusing to sell even commercial licenses to the OSDL or it's employees, which includes Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton.

How about... Arch or Monotone

[ikewillis]

Arch and Monotone are both GPL-licensed distributed development tools, and retain a BitKeeper-like distributed development model which Linux prefers.

Somehow Arch was immediately mentioned on the original thread about Linus's intent to switch away from BitKeeper, but somehow only Subversion has been mentioned on this one. Arch was created specifically with the goal of replacing BitKeeper as the SCM for the Linux kernel source, as it says on their web page:

It is somewhat well known, these days, that some of the core developers of the Linux kernel are using a revision control system which is not free software. There is a need to create a free software alternative to that system and to do so is one of the goals of the arch project

Re:How about... Arch or Monotone

[the eric conspiracy]

Monotone has been discussed and appears to be too slow. SVK, Darcs, and Arch are still in the running.

Re:How about... Arch or Monotone

[the eric conspiracy]

Monotone is too slow and SVK isn't??

Here is a quote from Linus:

"I'm playing with monotone right now. Superficially it looks like it has tons of gee-whiz neato stuff... however, it's *agonizingly* slow. I mean glacial. A heavily sedated sloth with no legs is probably
faster."

Darcs is interesting, but it already has a bad rep in regards to speed and scalability because of the Haskell infrastructure. I wouldn't put the kernel on it. There are also concerns about getting otehr developers to support it because of the Haskell code base. Right now it's a one man show.

Subversion already is well proven on large projects - the question is whether SVK is mature enough.

My guess is what is going to happen is that the kernel guys will do something custom, perhaps on top of or in conjection with SVK and SVN. Monotone, Darcs, etc aren't very likely, and Subversion by itself doesn't fit the distributed work flow of kernel development.

Re:How Does It Feel Linus?

[jacksonj04]

I absolutely adore the way that people don't have the balls to post with a username any more.

The whole point of Open Source is that people have CHOICES ABOUT WHAT THEY USE TO DO A TASK. If they don't like it they can tweak the code so it does what they want.

Last time I checked, using BitKeeper constituted a CHOICE on the part of Linus. One of the core principles behind OSS.

CVS is abysmal, and Subversion doesn't fit the Linux development model. Proprietary software may be evil, but if it's the best tool for the task then why should people deal with inferior OSS crap, which may need serious hacking to make it do what they want, when there's the option - the CHOICE - of using proprietary software?

Re:Q & A SCM?

[SA Stevens]

Linux needs somebody with a Donald Knuth mentality. Someone who will dedicate years on a side-trip to produce the best, most excellent, version controlling system possible. (Similar to Knuth's side-trip into Typesetting that produced the Wonder called TeX).

Re:*NOTE TO MODERATORS*

[A beautiful mind]

Thing is, this "new story" brought nothing new. We knew that he DID drop bitkeeper, from the three 5,informative moderated posts which linked to LKML in the previous story. Now we can read that very LKML announcement in this slashdot story aswell. We knew that he won't pick subversion from the previous story and from the subversion developers aswell.

What is new, that Linus wrote his own SCM (README here)

Maybe it will appear in 1-2 days as another slashdot story?

Re:Three Words

[Greyfox]

Maybe he could put the hurts on IBM and get them to open up CMVC. I don't believe they're still selling it or anything, so it doesn't really benefit them to keep it closed. And since IBM is nominally our friend and since it would probably be good marketing, I could see them considering it.

The Java CMVC client is actually pretty nice. Sucks less than VSS by a good bit.