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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.
Well, there's always CVS... *sigh*...
Or you could teach your code to two hundred trained squirrels, a la Tim Burton. Then every time you changed some code, you could train another squirrel. Not only would you have an army of Code Squirrels at your command, but... eh, you'd probably be locked up...
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Bitkeeper loses only customer
Visual Source Safe!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Lets start with an easy question.
What qualities does a replacement have to have, and what are the present alternatives missing?
SVK is a very sweet extension to SVN and actually rocks my world! :)
..I hate how everybody has critized Linus (specially the RMS/GNU front), when he never forced people to use BK.
I mean, when Linus started to use BK he promised things would be at least as good as they were before - and it's true (they've been better in fact), people still gets -rc's in GNU diff format at kernel.org. The official way of distributing patches has always been "clean", I don't know why people whined so much about BK, it's OK for me if Linus wants to use a propietary tool himself, as long as I'm not forced to use it. I've certainly not used or needed to use it for years, and I'm one of those people who tries -mm and -rcs all the time...
(and those who claim that people should behave differently and "give example" just because they're "leaders" can go to hell)
Perhaps it would be helpful if you would read the Wikipedia article on Bitkeeper, which explains what Bitkeeper is, why it is relevant to the linux kernel, and why its relevance to the linux kernel might be controversial enough to make it a slashdot news item.
Maybe the slashdot eds should start [?]-linking Wikipedia articles in story blurbs the way they used to with Everything2...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Primarily due to frustration with the speed of existing solutions, and the fact that they do badly with huge numbers of tiny changes to large projects (which is what he deals with), he's started writing something that he claims isn't an SCM. What it does is store versions of trees of files and allow them to be annotated. This is different from an SCM in that it lacks support for merging changes to get a version that nobody created before out of multiple versions that people created independantly. This makes it a history archival program rather than useful for collaboration directly.
On the other hand, it's self-hosting and sparse (the previous thing he wrote when confronted by the inavailability of something he wanted) is also available stored in it. Probably, be the middle of next week (if not the end of the weekend), he'll have if set up as sufficient for his purposes, and other people will be filling in support for the way they work.
Never?
The quote continues being true. IMO the reason why Linus is dropping BK is the license and flamewars - BK is great, but maybe the free alternatives have got better in those 3 years and now they're "good enought" to use with the kernel. It'd be certainly better if bitmover would make BK free, but that's not going to happen.
http://lwn.net/Articles/131313/
Check the "made the first version available" link towards the top
I don't have time to make a sig
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:
How much has Linus use of Bitkeeper hampered the development of a free software alternative? I mean, if Linus had used a free SCM since the beginning, chances are that much more effort would have invested in that very same system to make it better. Unfortunately all the past publicity has helped only Bitkeeper instead of the free software movement.
Thank you
If this whole absurd scenario is not an object lesson on why not to choose proprietary software nothing is.
Imagine that. A company pulling their license and then refusing to even sell licenses to you or your employees.
evil is as evil does
Uh, last I heard, that's neither illegal, immoral, or unexpected when you release a product to the world. I'm sorry they're unhappy about it, but it seems a bit naive to think that it won't happen and a bit stupid that they'd PO one of their most visible references over it.
That is all.
Also, you indeed were living in a shoebox :-) because BK was always licensed on a condition that the licensee does not work for a competitor, and does not work on a competing product. The definition of "competing" was at BK owner's discretion, and a lot of Subversion folks were denied the license two years ago. This was a bad deal from the start, and quite a few people said so on LKML. They were right. Search Google or LKML archives, they should have lots of discussion about that.
tired of people trying to reverse engineer their software
This is exactly the core issue, and exactly why BitKeeper isn't worth considering.
So which do you take issue with?
1. Writing non-free software is antisocial
or
2. If a job is based upon antisocial behaviour, one should get some other job
Personally I can't see how you could argue against 2, unless you are in fact antisocial and just don't care. RMS has been making a case for point 1 for years now, and the recent news with regards to BK is more supporting evidence for his argument.
Reading your comment to the interview, I can't understand your vehemence. It's irrational. If you have a choice of doing something bad or doing something good, why insist that it's okay to do the something bad? I don't want to put words into RMS' mouth, but I get the impression that when he states something like: "It is better not to program at all than to program non-free software", it's not a statement about the utility of free versus non-free software -- as you noted in your comment, a lot of non-free software is very useful -- but instead it is a statement concerning how programming as a practice in today's society should be carried out. Programming non-free software is not bad because it makes useful software -- that would be silly. It's bad because it supports a system in which non-free software proliferates and causes huge amounts of waste. It is essentially the same point as the one you quote.
The horrible irony of it all is that most non-free software is non-free by default, not because the owners of that software are profiting significantly by having it be non-free. Most software is written for internal use for internal projects. Embedded software is usually specialised to its hardware and of limited use to competing manufacturers. In as much as it is not limited, a culture of free software allows the programmers to write original software, not re-write what others have done hundreds of times before.
If hypothetically free software were to become the only legal form of software as of tomorrow, the vast majority of programmers would still be in a job. And those jobs would be better.
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?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I'm not convinced by your arguments, although I do note that most of the sub-points are valid. Specifically, I reject your conclusion.
If Linus did Linux the *BSD way, a few things would have to change.
Firstly, and foremostly, he would have to develop, and guide, the userland as well. That is part of the reason for the apparent stability of BSD interfaces - for some kernel->userland interfaces the implemetnation is hidden (for example, things that are used only by libc). Whether this is a good or bad thing on the partof the BSD's is irrelevent, it is a fundementaly different approach.
Currently, Linux provides a set of kernel level interfaces, and the GNU libc utiliese some of these to provide the standard C library. Some of the kernel interfaces are standard, (POSIX file stuff, sockets etc), some are not (Firewall, some threading interfaces etc).
Most fundementally, the reason I reject your conclusion can be best expressed as a question: "If the linux process is so poor, why is it more popular than *BSD?"
One can discuss that question ad nauseum, but I suspect that part of the reason is that it is _not_ tightly controlled. If you have a method for making some part better, the Linux apprach says: show me the code, convince us it's better. The *BSD approach says: Show me the code, convince us it's better, get somone on the core team to sponser it, shedule it for the next (or prehaps one after next) release, and wait.
Thus, Linux has a lot more mobility, and can utilise new approaches sooner than *BSD - for good or ill [0].
My personal thoughts is: Linux is not broken. The development model works as well now as it used to, thus there is no need to change. Let the two approaches co-exists, let people use whichever they feel like. If that means that Linux becomes a testbed for ideas, and *BSD cherry pick, then so be it, that's fine. If that means that Linux evolves and *BSD stagnates, so be it, that's fine. If that means that Linux is unstable and *BSD is stable, so be it, that's fine. In practice, the last two will be indistinguishable for a long time after one of them occurs.
Let them be different - choose your favourite model, and be happy with it. But if the other one results in something you prefer, consider that both are trade-offs, and neither is perfect.
[0] This can bring problems. The various VM saga's are prehaps a canonnical example here.
"The spirit of the Bitkeeper license is the spirit of the whip hand.
b rowse_thread/thread/a98de7edab73f365/7d68ee9f364e9 3f6
It is the spirit that says, "You have no right to use Bitkeeper, only
temporary privileges that we can revoke. Be grateful that we allow
you to use Bitkeeper. Be grateful, and don't do anything we dislike,
or we may revoke those privileges." It is the spirit of proprietary
software. Every non-free license is designed to control the users
more or less. Outrage at this spirit is the reason for the free
software movement. (By contrast, the open source movement prefers to
play down this same outrage.) "
- Richard Stallman Oct 13 2002, 3:50 pm
Maybe he is not a mad man, but actually a very wise man.
Here is the discussion link: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/linux.kernel/
So, in conclusion, big frickin' deal. BK got a few years of valuable, free beta testing, Linus got some work done, and the Open source folks got a reminder as to why the Free source folks got religon.
Luke, help me take this mask off
And you know that Linus reverse engineered UNIX? He recreated a system with the same API. What is wrong with that? There would be no progress at all if we weren't "stealing" each others ideas all the time. Neither in science, nor in art, nor in (software) engineering.
I find the current brainwashing efforts of "intellectual property" proponents to make us believe there is anything wrong with reverse engineering highly immoral, contradictory with human civilization and ignoring its history.
Unless you are on the same LAN as a Clearcase server, the thing is treacle slow because it sends dozens of packets flying back and forth just to figure out what items to put on a context menu. If you're using a VPN then creating a snapshot view can take many, many hours and even simple things like checkouts / checkins / diffs take minutes.
And because it works so badly over the WAN, if you have multiple sites you must replicate - more expensive servers, more admins and more licences.
It's not even a good source control system. It doesn't do anything aside from a dynamic view that can't be done by most other systems. Dynamic views are more trouble than they're worth anyway.
I truly pity companies who "bet the farm" on this junk. I pity IBM who had a perfectly usable source control system in CMVC who had to switch to this Rational junk.
For all its faults even CVS would be better. And with Subversion being available and UI frontends like TortoiseSVN, Subclipse etc. there really is no reason to be stuck with Clearcase.
No, not really. What Linus is doing looks completely different. It is quite similar to Monotone if anything, in fact. It has quite a good description of itself in the README (skip the top part there :-) ).
One consequence of what he is doing is that it is trivial to do e.g. pulling from remote repositories (basically just two rsync commands), or diffing arbitrary two trees. You can see my scripts as an example.
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams