Tridge Releases BitKeeper-Compatible Tool

Peter Willis writes "Looking at Freshmeat today (a part of OSTG) it seems Andrew Tridgell has released the BitKeeper-compatible source code management client mentioned on slashdot recently, called SourcePuller. As part of the downloads available for the project you can also get dump files which detail how to pull data from BK trees without the use of libsp. From the README: 'SourcePuller is not intended to be a full replacement for BitKeeper. Instead, you should use SourcePuller as an interoperability tool for situations where you cannot use bk itself. SourcePuller is missing a large amount of core functionality from BitKeeper, and thus is not suitable as a full replacement.'" Article available about the release on The Register.

Comments

As Tridge says in the README

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, I would like to point out the obvious fact that Linus was perfectly within his rights to choose bk for the kernel. I personally would not have chosen it, but it was his choice to make, not anyone elses. Linus is now in the unenviable position of changing source code management systems, which is a painful task, particularly when moving away from a system that worked as well as bk did. If you want to help, then help with code not commentary. There have been enough flames over this issue already.

so let's keep it civil, eh?

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[qortra]

Nice quote, but the thing is, that's all we CAN do here. Slashdot is not a place to do software development; it isn't set up for that. It's a place for discussion. So basically, discuss, praise the author, try & review the software, but if you want to "help with code", you're in the wrong place.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[Elwood P Dowd]

You heard it hear first, Tridge is anti-comments. If you want GCC to continue to support comments, speak up now or forever hold your peace.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

From the source code I've seen and debugged, it seems most programmers are anti-comments.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[Elwood P Dowd]

"heard it hear first"

Jesus God, that's one of the dumbest fuckups I've seen in a /. comment, and it's in my comment.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[snorklewacker]

> If you want to help, then help with code not commentary

Fact is, this is slashdot. It's the nee plus ultra of peanut galleries. Note well that Linus doesn't read or post to slashdot -- he's been busy working on git, which is not a great SCM itself, but it's turning out to be pretty hot as a library. Arch is adopting git as a backend, and darcs is talking about using libgit (once there is a libgit) for a performance boost.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[SnowZero]

Sometimes I am anti-comment. When I get some example code that has 10+ lines of comments per line of actual code, I usually delete most of the comments so I can see what the heck the code is actually doing. There is such a thing as too much verbosity, or at the very least, some documentation shouldn't be in the middle of the function.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[indifferent children]

it seems most programmers are anti-comments

You're kidding right? What do you call all of that whitespace that we sprinkle around our code? Those are comments.

If a block of code is especially self-contained or tricky, then it is surrounded by two carriage-returns before the block and two carriage-returns after the block.

If some statements are part of a loop, then we gratuitously indent them. That's not for the compiler's benefit; those are comments.

Don't even get me started on our extreme generosity in supplying names (not just types!) in our function and method prototypes. What, you want us to draw you a map?



BTW, I would submit more Insightful comments in my code if only my peers with good karma had Mod Points at code review time.

Re:As Tridge says in the README

[Foosinho]

Two "+5 Funny" out of the same post? I bow down to your slash-skills.

Might come in handy now

[Anonymous Coward]

with the move away from bitkeeper. :-D

On a serious note, it's good that this apparently oh so evil piece of software is finally out in the open, so that the people can see that all the fuss was about a tool that allows you to get your data that is managed by a propietary tool. How evil...

Re:Might come in handy now

[LiENUS]

Just a note, this tool assists in no way with the move away from bitkeeper, it was only of benefit when the linux kernel was still in bitkeeper. All this lets you do is pull source from a bitkeeper server, it does not replace the bitkeeper server. The way this benefits the open source community is now developers can begin intregrating this library into other development systems (like IDEs) and allowing bitkeeper integration.

Re:Might come in handy now

[4of12]

On a serious note, it's good that this apparently oh so evil piece of software is finally out in the open, so that the people can see that all the fuss was about a tool that allows you to get your data that is managed by a propietary tool.

In a way it's good to have issues like this bubble up to give people a chance to really think about the fundamental principles involved in open source development.

For instance, it would be hypocritical to applaud Tridge for his work on reverse-engineering SMB to create Samba and to simultaneously criticize him for doing the exact same thing with BK.

Likewise, to criticize MS for using secrecy to make money with its products, while decrying the effect Tridge's reverse engineering has on the income of the Larry trying to feed his family by selling BK.

The principles have to hold independent of the emotional circumstances and the players of the game.

FOSS is all about the natural migration of more and more software technology into commodities. And that will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow for anyone who has created new software that makes money for them. At some point, if the software is really useful, other competent programmers will look to produce a work-alike functionality. And it will be for the greater good of humanity as a whole because they will be able to use better tools for less money. Even as it erodes the financial benefits that accrue to one or to a few from having thought and done it first.

A happy ending would be Tridge's sofware encouraging more people to buy the BK core to interoperate with Sourcepuller. But, in the longer run, I expect a free core will eventually be developed and it will displace the proprietary one.

Like Grains of Sand in an Hourglass...

[jeff_schiller]

...so goes the soap opera that has become the Linux community

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[space_dude_27]

Perhaps because Tridge never set out to create a replacement for BK - merely a tool that would interoperate with it and enable you to get source out of a BK repository without actually running the BK client.

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[sfraggle]

I must say I haven't used it

Come back when you've tried to read the documentation - you'll quickly see why nobody in their right mind is considering GNU Arch.

Logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

A big huge middle finger!

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Flywheels has a history of linking articles at his site, PressEsc to un-related stories and comments, in order to boost his PageRank.

He has even linked to Google to redirect to his page so that he escapes detection from mods.

Feel free to check his history.

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[grumbel]

### I must say I haven't used it, but from reviews and comparisons I've read, it seems to be a good tool.

Well, try to use it then. The feature that it has indeed sound nice in theory, but Arch has huge problems when it comes to usability and performance, which make it unusable for something as large as Linux and unconfortable for most other projects around. A simple look at the 'help' already makes that pretty clear that there is something wrong with the userinterface:

$ svn help | wc -l
41
$ tla help | wc -l
186

Its however not a lost case, Bazaar-ng is trying to fix those problems of Arch:

* http://bazaar-ng.org/

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[cduffy]

Arch is a good tool -- once you've wrapped your mind around it. Coming from CVS, that's hard.

One of the problems I'm having at work is that, having wrapped my mind around Arch, I'm for all intends and purposes unable to go back to thinking in CVS primatives -- the conceptual model is that much better. However, since Arch isn't practical for use at my place of employment (no usable win32 port, much less one with a GUI the UI folks can use), I've become damn near useless as SCM advisor -- my mental model just isn't aligned for CVS anymore, and the thought of trying to "fix" that (by retraining myself to work within all of CVS's limitations again) is just too damn horrifying.

In a year and a half, maybe, or however long it is, Bazaar-NG will be ready for commercial use, and then we'll have somethnig that'll let me have my pretty conceptual model and actually be usable by the rest of staff. It's a dream, anyhow.

Wow, that's a lot of code for telnet poking around

[Chyeburashka]

zoopark:~/sp-0.1 gena$ cat `find . -name "*.c"` | wc -l
13416
zoopark:~/sp-0.1 gena$ cat `find . -name "*.h"` | wc -l
859
zoopark:~/sp-0.1 gena$ cat `find . -name "*.[ch]"` | wc -l
14275

Why the P.C name?

[thehunger]

A tool that lets you Pull stuff out of BitKeeper. How did he manage to avoid naming it BitPull?

Re:Why the P.C name?

[williw]

As soon as I read your comment, I immediately thought he should have call it PitBull or KeepBitter (get it... reverse engineering reverse name, unintended consequences. har har har)

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[spworley]

Its however not a lost case, Bazaar-ng is trying to fix those problems of Arch

And with the support of the community, and a lot of developer work, they'll be able to reduce Arch's 'help' text down to only 10 words, making it the most powerful source control system.

This is what Larry was complaining about?

[X.25]

If *this* is the project Larry was complaining about so much, I can't wait to hear what he has to say now.

Larry, is THIS the reverse engineering you were talking about? Stealing your ideas? Making OSS version of BitKeeper? Blah, blah.

There were so many cases of people making opensource software talking to proprietary back-end (getting stock quotes with tool via TCP, for example, instead of using Java/Windows clients), and noone really made so much noise.

I have no respect anymore for BitKeeper and Larry if this is all Tridge was "reverse engineering".

Re:This is what Larry was complaining about?

[MattW]

And what the hell was Linus talking about? He can understand not wanting someone "riding on their coattails, solve the problem yourself" - what problem? A tool for pulling snapshots? This is not the vast mysteries of SCM being solved, this is a utility.

Re:Why not GNU Arch?

[krmt]

I tried using arch to manage my debian packages, which have an upstreamversion-packageversion versioning number scheme. Both tla and baz complained that this wasn't an appropriate version number. This is beyond annoying, it makes arch unusable for my fairly simple needs.

Plus, the UI is completely tied to the implementation, so you have to know a ton about the underpinnings of arch in order to use tla. I don't want to know how arch does what it does. I don't care.

The baz people are working on fixing this, but there's a lot of problems to be fixed (see this for the massive list) and I think it'll take them some time to do so. Currently, baz is pretty buggy for me too, segfaulting on things like branching. That said, I have a lot of faith in both the baz team and Martin Pool, simply because they've thought things through very well. Currently though, tla and baz are nothing but an exercise in pain for me to use, and bzr isn't ready yet. I'll keep checking on them, because I really want to like them, but they make it so hard on me.

Re:Waste of time

[Quixote]

Look at the date: 2005/03/17 (or March 17th 2005 for the rest of you). Obviously it was released to undercut Tridge.

Tridge had 2 options after that:
a) release his version (which is also just a client) and get the "is this it? But why did Tridge do that?" comments like the parent; or
b) not release it, and let the rumors fly around.

I'm glad Tridge chose to release his version and now we can all move on. Of course, the real loser in this is McVoy (he lost his biggest mouthpiece), followed by Linus (who has to now duplicate the functionality of BK as much as he can, and while he's mucking with the tools the kernel development takes a backseat).

Re:Waste of time

[Bananenrepublik]

Tridge's tool is about extracting the complete history out of a bitkeeper server, bitkeeper's open client is about providing an equivalent to cvs up. Fairly obvious if you RTFA and TFPYLT (the f*cking page you're linking to).

Used already?

[jefu]

Isn't that Wendy's new Logo?