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Linus on Subversion, GPL3, Microsoft and More
victor77 writes "Linus has repeatedly slammed Subversion and CVS, questioning their basic architecture. Subversion community has responded...how valid is Linus's statement?" This and many other subjects are covered in this interview with Linus.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
/efytimes/lefthome.asp, line 193
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 182) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.
I hereby release this comment under a GPL. You are free to use this comment or modify this comment in away you feel fit. But if you distribute this comment or any modifications of it, you need to also publish all the embarrassing things you have said said drunk.
Sunday, August 19, 2007: Did Microsoft's Men In Black ever met Linus Torvalds? But why is he so critical of GPLv3? Why does he slam Subversion? What would happen to the kernel development if he chooses to do something else more important? These are some of the questions Linux/open source community from around the globe wanted to ask Linus. And, here is Linus candid and blunt, and at times diplomatic. Check if the question you wanted to ask to the father of Linux is here and what does he have to say...
Q: What are the future enhancements/paths/plans for the Linux kernel? --Subramani R
Linus: I've never been much of a visionary -- instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short timeframe of 'issues in the next few months'. I'm a big believer in that the 'details' matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own.
So I really don't have any great vision for what the kernel will look like in five years -- just a very general plan to make sure that we keep our eye on the ball. In fact, when it comes to me personally, one of the things I worry about the most isn't even the technical issues, but making sure that the 'process' works, and that people can work well with each other.
Q: How do you see the relationship of Linux and Solaris evolving in the future? How will it benefit the users?
Linus: I don't actually see a whole lot of overlap, except that I think Solaris will start using more of the Linux user space tools (which I obviously don't personally have a lot to do with -- I really only do the kernel). The Linux desktop is just so much better than what traditional Solaris has, and I expect Solaris to move more and more towards a more Linux-like model there.
On the pure kernel side, the licensing differences mean that there's not much cooperation, but it will be very interesting to see if that will change. Sun has been making noises about licensing Solaris under the GPL (either v2 or v3), and if the licence differences go away, that could result in some interesting technology. But I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude to that.
Q: Now that the GPLv3 has been finalised and released, do you foresee any circumstance that would encourage you to begin moving the kernel to it? Or, from your perspective, is it so bad that you would never consider it? -- Peter Smith / Naveen Mudunuru.
Linus: I think it is much improved over the early drafts, and I don't think it's a horrible licence. I just don't think it's the same kind of 'great' licence that the GPLv2 is.
So in the absence of the GPLv2, I could see myself using the GPLv3. But since I have a better choice, why should I?
That said, I try to always be pragmatic, and the fact that I think the GPLv3 is not as good a licence as the GPLv2 is not a 'black and white' question. It's a balancing act. And if there are other advantages to the GPLv3, maybe those other advantages would be big enough to tilt the balance in favour of the GPLv3.
Quite frankly, I don't really see any, but if Solaris really is to be released under the GPLv3, maybe the advantage of avoiding unnecessary non-compatible licence issues could be enough of an advantage that it might be worth trying to re-license the Linux kernel under the GPLv3 too.
Don't get me wrong -- I think it's unlikely. But I do want to make it clear that I'm not a licence bigot, per se. I think the GPLv2 is clearly the better licence, but licences aren't everything.
After all, I use a lot of programs that are under other licences. I might not put a project I start myself under the BSD (or the X11-MIT) licence, but I think it's a great licence, and for other projects it may well be the right one.
Q: Currently are there any Indians who you'd like to highlight as key contributors to the Linux kernel?
Linus: I have to admit that I don't directly work with anybody that I actually realize as being from India. That said, I should clarify a bit: I've very consciously tried
This one is not (yet) slashdotted:
http://www.efytimes.com/archive/144/news.htm
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 666) was summoned by an evil deadlocked process in order to lock up and throw away the key to any IT resources process to request any reasonable requirement for open source software chosen by the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction with Microsoft products next time and this threat will disappear into thin air - Steve Balmer, Head Deadlocker.
This article is only slightly about Subversion. A couple paragraphs from the whole thing! They talk about "the plan" for the Kernel, outsourcing to India (they talk a lot about India actually), and other crap. I got bored half way through and just searched for the subversion part, which even then wasn't that interesting.
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Good God. People are pathetic, listening to Linus as if he has great insights as to the mysteries of the universe. He's just a kernel developer that was in the right place at the right time to do the right thing.
Perspective, please!
This is my sig.
From the opensource.org license-discuss mailing list (just today!):
From: meteor <emailaddychanged@iiitb.ac.in>
To: license-discuss@opensource.org
Subject: Browsers
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 02:41:00 -0700 (PDT)
Hi all, as compared to you all am only a starter as far as opensource softwares go and so i need some help from u guys. I am developing an application for PDA and require a light-weight browser for it. I have got an option of using Firefox but can nebody suggest me a lighter browser. Any kind of help will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Regards
meteor
Well, it isn't for lack of trying...
The Banjo Players Must Die!
He says this:
"But in the end, choice may be inefficient, but it's also what keeps everybody involved at least 'somewhat' honest. We all probably wish our politicians were more honest than they are, and we all probably wish that the different distros sometimes made other choices than they do, but without that choice, we'd be worse off."
==============
I personally do get frustrated by all the different distros and their package requirements. But strangely, it's those choices that make it fun and interesting. Yeah, yeah I do get lazy sometimes and would rather install an rpm cleanly without compiling from source sometimes but I wouldn't get better without the challenges. As for politicians, choices, and fair honest government; I live in America so forget it. THE EMPIRE RISES!!
SVN and CVS are version control systems that help to sync the code from different developers into one codebase.
Both do their job (CVS since years). SVN does some trivial things better than CVS.
SVN is a little more newbie friendly than CVS because it's cmdlines need less options (e.g. only 'svn update' instead of 'cvs update -PRd').
git (started and favored by Linus) does everything better but is much more difficult to use.
If you're a newbie programmer and need version control you might start with CVS and SVN. git might be overkill. Especially for one-man-projects.
My project recently switched from BitKeeper (Torvalds preferred system before the license issues) to SVN. BitKeeper is a nice system and I think it is better if you have a good development process. For my project with less than 10 developers and with a loose process, SVN is the better tool. SVN allows updates to single files and this really comes in handy whereas BitKeeper forces _everything_ as atomic changesets. For example, if a global.h in the trunk gets updated with new parameters and I only want to incorporate the changes to this file in a branch, it is no problem. But in BitKeeper, I could only make this update if a) the changes to global.h where the only changes in the ChangeSet, and b) if no other changesets were pushed prior to the trunk. BitKeeper does *not* allow cherry-picking of Changesets. I've tried doing so with scripts and patch files, but it is messy at best.
Only people interested in the kernel I suppose. Personally I think people who name non-gnu projects with a gnu in front of the name may have a slight bias against him due to the LiGnuX naming debacle and the repeat with the gnu prefix. Thus the "flying hoot" can be forgiven and understood. Just put up with him even if he has different views on GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - it's not some huge heresy.
We don't need any front page stories about Torvalds at all. He wrote an OS... like 20 years ago. Get over it, he's just a guy. No one cares what he thinks about anything unless it has the word "linux" in it.
Linus isn't slamming SVN and he responses very insightful why he things git is better. Please, stop this propaganda style summary writing, it is getting very old.
Nevermind that, interview was ok, not lot of new info, but much calmer and clever Linus than last months.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
LOL. They actually ask us to perform DDOS?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
- anybody who likes to hear an opinion that's usually sensible, well thought-through, honest, and devoid of humbug?
- someone who is interested in hearing from the guy who succeeds in maintaining sufficient technical credit to have the likes of Alan Cox, Andrew Morton, and a raft of others you've never heard about listen to him?
- people who think that the ideas of a fellow whose ideas proved fruitful might be interesting?
Come to think of it ... why would anyone care about what Bill Gates thinks? Apart from him still being one of the sharpest cookies in the industry that is. Why indeed? The money he has to spend? Is that your criterion?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
CVS was before SVN which was before git.
Currently, people migrate from CVS to SVN.
Migration is painful, people don't like to migrate, because 'if it isn't broken, don't fix it'.
Linus himself said, SVN is 'good enough', and i agree.
I won't switch to git, right now. One switch a year was enough, and I did a CVS->SVN switch recently.
But I don't say, i won't use git in the future.
Some parts of SVN i dislike, including crashes when writing up the commit comment.
I just don't want to learn a fundamentally different stuff, and bother with migration.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
And what I really want to do is simply work in Eclipse. This rant neatly sums up my feelings on the current state of source code version control. From it:
I've already spent *much* time and effort and still I haven't implemented a working version control system, stemming from the source at drupal.org, (my pet project).
And FWIW, I've ready several docs on Bazaar & Drupal, and what exists leads to a dead dead dead server. It's as if there was a sudden interest among the Drupal community for Bazaar, and then everyone (or at least according to Google) went silent. Like Roanoake.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
There are other issues: the Subversion authors have made a very real mistake here in keeping unencrypted passwords online, by default, in every public Linux or UNIX client compiled from Subversion's basic source code.
I just had to have a polite conversation with a professional peer who kept his home directory on his laptop, then turned on NFS shares "to get work done". I waited, very politely, until he put his laptop on the DMZ with his NFS shares turned on. Then I pulled his SSH keys for a set of sourceforge projects from his directory, and his password from his oher Subversion repositories. Voila! I now have write access to his Sourceforge subversion epositories.
I'm patient. But crackers aren't, and scan for this sort of vulnerability constantly. The Subversion authors should never have bothered to include the ability to store the password, at all.
As to my 'iconic image', I tend to dislike that part personally. I'm not a great public speaker, and I've avoided travelling for the last several years because I'm not very comfortable being seen as this iconic 'visionary'. I'm just an engineer, and I just happen to love doing what I do, and to work with other people in public.
This, people, is the key difference between Linux and Microsoft, and even Apple. Steves Ballmer and Jobs both want to be seen as visionaries, as all-knowing technological sages of our time. That isn't neccessarily a bad thing, as we've seen with the way Jobs has turned Apple around since he took over, but it does explain the difference between the philosophies of the groups: Apple and Microsoft take the approach of throwing new features in whenever they find them, so as to be seen as forward-thinking and 'next-gen', and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't - Spotlight being an example of something that does work (yeah, there had been desktop search before, but nothing quite that efficient and right-on-the-desktop in what can be called the 'Big 3' operating systems), and things like the are-they-in, are-they-out dropped features from Vista being an example of something that doesn't.
Linux, however, taking it's cues from Linus, approaches things from an engineering perspective. Visionary? That's all well and good, but will it run the risk of breaking? Yes? Then it's not going in. When you don't have a product to sell, it's a lot easier to base your development priorites on a more sound engineering base. Therein lies the difference; Jobs and Ballmer see themselves as visionaries, while Linus - who, whether he likes it or not, is the 'spiritual leader' of the Linux community - sees himself as 'just an engineer'. (Of course, the point could be made that Linus has the luxury of only being concerned with the kernel, where security and stability are the key things and form over function is rarely if ever required - do the likes likes of Mark Shuttleworth, Matthew Szulik, etc see themselves as engineers, or as visionaries?)
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Yes, slashdotted: but not a bandwidth/clients problem, but a horrible programming error, it seems.
gtkaml.org
Why did you specify bitlength 4? Wouldn't it work for any unsigned units since the leading zeros would turn into leading ones in the invert operation?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Damnit, it's a paradigm shift that Linus is talking about. True distributed source code management brings an entirely new way of working. It enables very fast merging at a very fine granularity, which lets you use casually use this information (about what changed and when) in a way that changes the nature of how you work! It's the same sort of difference that code completion or Google search made. Once a certain kind of very useful information -- that has always been available, but a bit inconveniently -- becomes like running water out of the tap, it enables ways of working that just wouldn't have been practical before.
4 4603874737&q=git+google+tech+talk&total=3&start=0& num=10&so=3&type=search&plindex=1
If you really want to know what Linus is talking about from the man himself, watch this Google Tech Talk. It's over an hour, but there's nothing like hearing it straight from the horse's mouth.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-21993320
Yes.
There are good reasons for this, but it would be redundant to repeat them here on Slashdot.
If CVS isn't broken, I have a three-legged ladder I'd like to sell you. I'll even set it up in the parking lot and, with but a modest presence of mind, balance myself motionlessly on the very top step to prove how very not-broken it really is. On one foot. And I'll juggle, too.
CVS is what happens when you've roped yourself up into some high, awkward, inaccessible place, then you discover you brought along the wrong toolbox. Subversion is a fancy pair of vise-grips with rubber handles: doesn't hurt your hand so much when you have to grasp with extreme force the bolt head with no remaining flat edges, because you're too damn lazy to rope yourself back down to get the tool you should have used in the first place.
I haven't done a tremendous amount with it, but it is just as easy to set up a repository, and I never get the weird errors you're talking about.
:-) Even so, the extra features are cool enough that I still use darcs for some projects.
Things darcs does that svn/cvs/VSS/ClearCase/etc don't do:
* name patches (commit sets) & find them trivially by name later
* trivially apply explicit patches to alternate branches
* automatically find all patches that a patch depends on
* create repositories trivially
* see who committed specific lines of code
Git didn't appear to do a lot of that - no naming of patches, no seeing who last modified specific lines of code, no automatically determining patch dependencies.
The big problem is that for long revision histories, darcs seems to have a few bugs. Everything I've seen people talk about on the mailing list they've been able to fix or work around, but I have a very low tolerance for bugs in my revision control tool
Oh, the other thing: darcs is written in Haskell. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
Can't read the article linked as it's being slashdotted but I saw the talk he did at Google and I have to say that he missed two big points:
..many people need to version binaries, and many need a simple user interface.
In fact one of the handicaps of SVN is that it doesn't have a client like WinCVS. TortoiseSVN works nice, but most users just want a separate app.
So he can make his point as much as he wants, but there is a reason why 5000 employees at Google base their work on Perforce and not on GIT.
ole'"La presi e te la pagai (480.000 Lire)"
MS was dead before this. It just has a lot of folks who pay money to them, and are afraid to say that they are wasting money.
P.S. I always found SQL Server weird. Originally coded my Sybase, but much lower performance. It is almost like the goal on the MS side, was to slow it down once the source changed hands, weird.
``Q: India is one of the major producers of software engineers, yet we don't contribute much to the Linux domain. What do you think is keeping Indians from becoming proactive on that front? How do you feel we could encourage Indians to get involved and contribute heavily? You have a fan following in India; could your iconic image be used to inspire enthusiasts? -- Bhuvaneswaran Arumugam.
Linus: This is actually a very hard question for me to answer. Getting into open source is such a complicated combination of both infrastructure (Internet access, education, you name it), flow of information and simply culture that I can't even begin to guess what the biggest stumbling block could be.''
My guess is it's because the _bulk_ of Indian software engineers are being raised on Microsoft technology (the fact that it's Microsoft is irrelevant here; what matters is that it isn't Linux and doesn't resemble Linux). I don't actually know that this is the case, but I suspect it. I've spoken to a number of people from various parts of the world that aren't Europe or North America, and the picture I get is mostly the same: virtually everybody who uses a computer uses (cheap or pirated) Windows, if you take classes in CS you are taught Microsoft tools, and, at work, you use Windows. It's like nothing else exists. Why would you contribute to Linux, coming from such an environment?
Also, I know for a fact that a lot of people in India get trained on Java. That's yet another platform that isn't Linux and, even if it's more like Linux than Microsoft's platform is, it's still different in important ways. Besides, Java can run under Linux...but that's not what usually happens.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Who cares? People who need Torvalds to think for them. One problem is the first name convention which has the effect of elevating him to somebody special. Impartial people should only use "Linus" by itself only when it would be appropriate for anyone else. Another problem are the contradictions in his widely publicized opinions. E.g., on the one hand, on other occasions he likes to hold up kernel development as akin to science. OTOH, he and his fanboys tout his blunt style as sometimes encouraging strong rebuttals, as if progress requires a blunt style. That's not at all borne out in the history of science and engineering.
Another problem with his blunt style is how what he considers good is synonymous with what he considers good for the kernel: e.g., git is good for the kernel, therefore, Torvalds concludes, git is the best. It is very likely that at this point, other considerations make other RCS's better than git for the vast majority of projects. Another example is how the GPLv3 prevents something that Torvalds supports--Tivoization. Therefore, he claims, GPLv3 is worse than GPLv2 for the kernel, and thus, he falsely concludes, GPLv3 is worse than GPLv2 in general. GPLv3 may very well be worse than GPLv2, but the only people for whom he has observed it to be true, are those who believe that Tivoization of the Linux kernel should be allowed. But Torvalds always tries to elevate that group to somehow matter more than others.
Actually, one of SQL Server's best feature compared to most RDBMS is performance. I mean, for enterprise level operations (read: not just serving semi-static wiki-style data), there really is only Oracle that can pump something faster (maybe DB2?), and not even close to doing so in all scenarios, so...
:) "Minimum requirement: Intel Core 2 Quad * 2, 16 gigs of RAM..." or something.
The dev tools, are another story
Though the above error message is almost surely a stupid programmer error, as someone else already pointed out...
He has slammed the practicality of SVN within the Linux project. And the Linux project is a highly unique project. It is worked on by thousands, used passively by millions, it is the subject of constant experimentation (branches), it has no commanding leadership, etc. It needs a version control system which can handle that.
SVN is fine where there is a central command to control all the source (this is true in all corporate use and most projects in general), people can be assumed to be network connected while accessing the repos (true in corporate use), and there isn't a lot of experimentation / branching (true in corporate use and most projects).
Every time he's slamming SVN he's slamming how unacceptable it would be for Linux, not saying that it's some curse on the universe. It's a different tools for different jobs thing. I think he's right. And for everything I do I'll continue to use SVN because it's great for the roles I need it for. These are all typical corporate style projects where I want central control of everything, we have a project plan so there isn't a lot of need for branching, etc. SVN is great for that and I don't think Linus would say otherwise.
----------------
Web application development
He's right about Subversion, but he misses one point:
Putting your project in a Subversion repository takes an hour or two, maybe half a day if you're an idiot. Setting up an arch repository took me at least twice as long. Explaining how to use arch to developers who hadn't worked with it before is an order of magnitude more difficult than explaining Subversion to developers who haven't worked with it before.
Subversion is "good enough", but it's also simple, straightforward and frankly if you have anything that goes beyond a very simple project or where more than one person is involved, I can't think of many reasons to not put it into a Subversion repository.
I still like arch more for the concepts. But I don't use it. I might look at git one of those days, if I have a need Subversion doesn't address.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No. They are just using some bad methodologies for updating the database each time an article is read. Given the variety of places I see errors happening, it appears they are hitting the database many times over the course of constructing one page, and are updating something in the database for each one of those hits in a way that requires a transaction lock. They'd have the same problem on a database run on Linux if they don't change the way they use the database. It's an architecture design problem.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Perhaps slightly off topic, but I realize now that I'm always compelled to read stories with Linus' name because I'm a fan (not fanboy) and user of Linux. However, the man never seems to have anything positive to say. Really, is his opinion all that relevant anymore? Of course he will always be somewhat relevant due to the fact he is pretty much in charge of the kernel and contributes heavily to it, not to mention the trademark holder of Linux, but in the end he really has to answer to the community. He has to know he can't ever bite the hand that feeds him or people will go other directions.
I'm not trying to troll or insight a flame war, I'm just saying his curmudgeonly ways are getting a bit old already. At some point I imagine him being viewed as the Dvorak of Linux. Anyway, I'll understand if I get modded down, I just wanted to put my opinion in even if it's not worth much.
The Linux kernel is, I think, a classic case of 'good enough'. It's what people are used to, and it's 'good enough' to be used fairly widely, but it's good enough in exactly the sense DOS and Windows were 'good enough'. Not great technology, just very widely available, and it works well enough for people and looks familiar enough that people use it.
Linus Torvalds has managed one of the most successful software development programmes ever witnessed and, with git, has sped development up by 2 times or more on the most complexly structured, most variable development team I've ever heard about.
If all you do is democode then Linus doesn't matter, for everybody else his opinion really counts.
Look at what he says: "I am developing an application for PDA and require a light-weight browser for it..."
ie. his boss has told him to find something they can steal.
Nope, he's coming from iiitb.ac.in - the Indian Institue of Information Technology's graduate school in Bangalore. He's trying to avoid doing his own thesis work.
"For very complex systems, it is insane to require an user to know the meaning and default setting of every parameter, even if the user is an expert."
Then why is an "expert" fooling around with a "complex" system? Maybe there should be "novices" operating "simple" systems so no one goes "insane".
"Do you know the default setting of every parameter used in the fuel injection system in your car? My guess is that not even the technician at the car repair shop does. He trusts them to be sane.
Does the pilot of an airplane know the default setting of every parameter in the flight control system? Not even the pre-flight checklist covers them all. He just trusts them to be sane."
Your examples suck dude. If we were discussing OSS software? You can bet there would be a crowd that would demand you know every parameter of every system and memorize the source code to boot. And calling you a MSCE if you don't.
I think that Linus doesn't really care about Linux competing in the market place.
Well I see one problem with all of them. They don't work with image-based languages. i.e. Squeak.
He's a sanctimonious a-hole. The kind that doesn't feel guilty about it either.
GP: The average IQ is 100.
Parent: I am not so sure about that. I once met a guy with an IQ of 125.
I thought the repository was only *logically* copied. Only the differences are actually stored.
> Putting your project in a Subversion repository takes an hour or two
.git/config
Indeed. And putting your project in git takes maybe 30 seconds:
cd project
git init
git add .
git commit
Takes a few more minutes if you want to put it on a public repository:
Go to repo.or.cz and register the project (fill out one short form)
(why aren't there more hosting sites? SourceForge flat out refuses to offer git hosting...)
Add public target url to
git push --all public
Having only recently switched to git from subversion, I'm still in the state of pure awe at how much easier it is to use...
"Thats what i would do if I had my site running on Microshit stuff."
Pfft! The only way your site would get any hits is if the server was placed in the middle of the freeway.
"However, the man never seems to have anything positive to say. Really, is his opinion all that relevant anymore?" - by Seven001 (750590) on Sunday August 19, @01:37PM (#20286737)
He's VERY relevant, & in 1 regard (imo, @ least) - because Mr. T. holds the dev team to a fairly 'small' (purely relative term) on the CORE development, & the kernel of the LINUX(es) in HIS control?
SMART!
Imo, Linus T. keeps what happened to UNIX's from happening to LINUX - fragmentation, SO bad, that one binary on 1 version of *NIX won't run on another version of *NIX...
I.E.-> IMO? Mr. T.'s control @ the "kernel/core level" of the Linux OS helps (partially @ least) to keep Linux from splintering into a "bunch of warring factions" that cannot "get along" basically...
& THAT is what happened to UNIX in general!
(E.G.-> Between Bell Labs original & say, BSD variants (this particular *NIX variant case in particular bugged ME recently - I saw that the multiplatform CIS TOOL (a security benchmark) would run on FreeBSD, but not OpenBSD... though they come from the SAME BASE CODETREE (Berkeley code)), Solaris, SCO, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Linux etc. et al...)
Imo? Guys, today??
We should ALL have been running some form of UNIX on our PC's, but this 'war for domination of the PC OS market' (for lack of a better expression on my part, but this WAS what it was no doubt about it between various *NIX vendors on ALL hardware platforms) did THAT concept, right in...
Good opening for Bill Gates & crew, really...
They took the biggest share of the market, with inferior OS @ the time no less, in DOS, & even later in Win3.x/9x! UNIX & Os/2 were technically superior... IBM ditched out on Os/2 imo, & UNIX vendors could NOT agree on std.'s & a unified point of control (& thus, today you have what you have, between *NIX's: binary incompatibilities)... Linus T. stops that for Linux @ least.
However/today? Windows NT-based ones ARE DEFINITELY "on par" with any *NIX, & better in many respects (including device driver capability, more refined applications base, & probably larger than on *NIX in general + of higher quality & compatibility with the majority of users out there & what tools they use, & overall development for the Microsoft Windows NT-based OS platform (where the MONEY IS MADE TODAY, mostly - & money? TALKS LOUD! They say, "talk's cheap", but... not when money does the talking!))
Money... it spurs developers & companies to create product, more than anything imo, because we all have to eat/make bills/plan for our future & those of our family etc. (big motivator).
All in all? L.T. & the folks working on Linux are good people, who must REALLY believe in what they're doing... they kept @ it, to compete with Windows, where even HUGE CORPORATIONS LIKE IBM, who had Os/2 which WAS a 'better DOS & better Windows' & better OS period, than Win3.x by a LONGSHOT, gave up.
Pretty impressive that, imo @ least.
I personally think Mr. T. is positive on many notes, very thoughtful, and very, VERY intelligent... from a number of his statements in said interview in fact.
My fav. being this one:
"Linus: I've never been much of a visionary -- instead of looking at huge plans for the future, I tend to have a rather short timeframe of 'issues in the next few months'. I'm a big believer in that the 'details' matter, and if you take care of the details, the big issues will end up sorting themselves out on their own"
Because, that man's RIGHT AS RAIN & you can tell he is of a developer's mindset: The "devil's ARE in the details"...
Without working on them? YOU CANNOT SOLVE THOSE 100,000 foot view visions/problems others have. Every BIG problem, has its roots in MANY smaller ones.
AND, largely imo?
Well, & others MAY disagree with me here:
I think ANYONE can 'do the broad strokes' & spot a problem or whatever...
HOWEVER
"Linus Torvalds has managed one of the most successful software development programmes ever witnessed and, with git, has sped development up by 2 times or more on the most complexly structured, most variable development team I've ever heard about." - by Bloater (12932) on Sunday August 19, @02:22PM (#20287033)
t hreshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20288395
Excellent reply... I could not have said it better myself:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=273761&
(You said what I was trying to say in the URL above in this very post, albeit myself being perhaps overly detailed + verbose, in a shorter number of words)
APK
P.S.=> "Mr. T." as I affectionately call L.T., per the URL above (just as I call Mr. Bill Gates "King Billy", respectfully, not in mockery)?
Imo, @ least?
He's a rare type of guy: He can function @ the "devil's in the details" levels, as well as the mgt. "plan ahead/visionary levels", though he tries to downplay it... he does well on BOTH fronts! Linux surviving "unfractured" @ binaries compatibilities levels has a LOT to do with HIM (and the devs of KDE/GNOME & their Qt/GTK usermode code toolkits too)...
That (incompatibilities between *NIX variants @ binaries levels) is, imo @ least? Is what KILLED UNIX on the PC platform...
I.E.-> Too many incompatibilities between various *NIX's... AND, this is what partially kept Ms ontop for SO LONG on the converse - compatbility with past OS & software versions!
A lesson for us all, really... in business, even MORE than computing! apk
(Linus with a little balloon on hovering over his head)
"Oh hi, i shiftedz ur paradigmses."
Paradigmses, he shifted them.
Because I've _never_ seen a MySQL error from some random online forum.
"Merge Tracking in Subversion 1.5.0 is roughly equivalent in functionality to svnmerge.py, recording and using merge history to avoid common cases of the repeated merge problem, and allowing for cherry-picking of changes." -- http://subversion.tigris.org/merge-tracking/
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
For anyone who can't think for themselves, yes, his opinion really counts.
I, personally, like to form my own opinions of things. While Linux has been seized upon by people as a great operating system. The only good thing about it is that it's free.
Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture which, as many operating systems experts will tell you, has number of problems.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that he's some kind of visionary, when he's not. The man never says anything positive about anyone else's work. I find it really tiring to listen to him rail on everything under the sun... speaking of Sun. Linus railed against them for not giving anything to the community.... let's examine that assertion for a minute:
Sun has:
1) Given it's OS out under a Free Software license
2) Given it's Processor out under the GPL
3) Released Open Office under the GPL
4) Is in the process of releasing Java under the GPL.
What else would you like them to give? Does he want them to drop Solaris and start being a Linux distributor?
Linus poo-poo's CVS and SVN as being "good enough." While I agree that CVS certainly does suck, SVN is not a the piece of crap he thinks it us.
He regularly criticizes RMS. I don't agree with everything RMS says, but some of the things that Linus dings him on are completely assinine. The GPLv2 was created before certain technologies existed. The GPLv3 was made to address the problems these new technologies present... and keeps with the spirit of the GPLv2. Linus is too blind to see this.
Don't kid yourself... he's no one's hero. He's just started to believe his own press.
Good day.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Does anyone know how git handles compared to alienbrain?
i.e. Can it store large binary files? (~64M+)
How well does it integrate into Dev Studio?
Are there any plug-ins for previewing binary files (pictures/movies/audio)?
> Don't kid yourself... he's no one's hero. He's just started to believe his own press.
Nono, he's always been an arsehole. But when it comes to "herding cats" you have to listen to his experiences because you can't learn how to do what he's been doing day-in day-out for 15 years without either doing the same or fastforwarding by learning from his time doing it.
First of all: by all accounts he was an extremely good programmer. To the point where the joke in Redmond was: "Can't hack it? Give it to Bill, he'll program it in Basic over the weekend." Well ... there are other very good programmers, and not a few who are better than Bill, but as far as I understand, Bill was also very good at helicoptering between programming detail and marketing significance. There aren't many who can do that.
Secondly he spotted the main chance and succeeded in grabbing it. Not so much as a visionary, but as someone who carefully listens to what people have to say ... in case they say something that he can use. Personally I think this is reflected in Microsoft's "tail light chaser tactics".
I think we can agree that although Microsoft hardly ever came up with any *conceptually* new software (except perhaps Clippy the Office Assistant ... may he rest in peace forevermore}, it tended to buy good ideas and usually succeeded in turning those into software that people wanted to buy. Because it was cheaper than the competition, fairly intuitive to use, and "good enough".
Now that *sounds* easy ... just spot a good idea and do it better. But the industry is awash with people who had a good idea and slipped up because they missed some detail along the line and continued not to spot the problem until it was too late. Like e.g. IBM's micro-computer division to IBM's PC operating system division to the WordPerfect Corporation to Borland to Lotus to Ashton-Tate. All of them had success, and woke up too slowly when things went subtly wrong for them. In most cases that "something" was Microsoft coming up with a competing product (whether home-grown or bought}.
You can't pull something like that off without a very clear perception of where things stand and where they're moving. I think that that is an area in which Bill excelled.
Remember when Microsoft threatened to miss the boat on this thing called "Internet"? Remember how a certain Billg first refused to see it, then suddenly did, and then made his company turn on a dime and go all-out for Internet functionality? He later admitted that he'd seen the new development too late ... but he did catch on in the end, and long before many other captains of industry. And when he did, he took the right action.
That's what I mean. How many big bosses are perceptive enough to spot when they're barking totally up the wrong tree, and objective enough to switch trees? That's what I think we should credit him for. Regardless of anything else.
It is funny to have four comments on a post marked as "Redundant"
--Sam
By providing such useful information about the site design in a simple exception, the site is already Pwn3d. Unless the site is really running RHEL with Apache and an error page script that generates messages like this to mess with hackers. Not that I would know anything about using this technique ;)
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
I used git for about three weeks at work, importing the entire SVN repository at work into git. It was pretty nice having the entire repository history on my local machine, and I was able to do cool stuff like running a blame on the entire repository and finding out who was responsible for what percentage of the code base -- and running this was pretty fast (it would have taken forever on a traditional source code control system like subversion).
I used the git-svn bridge, which allows you to use a subversion repository to sync into your local git repository, so that everyone else can use subversion while you use git and merge back and forth. This worked really well, and merging things was extremely easy, like Linus says.
Unfortunately the biggest problem with git, at least for a group with a fairly structured development process (i.e., everyone commits into the same main repository) is that git has no sense of a timeline. Well, actually, it does, but you have to use this GUI tool to view where branch merges and such happen so you can figure out what hash to pass in when you want to check out a specific associated subversion revision number. Part of the advantage of subversion is that the revision numbers increment, and it's easy to tell if you have a file that is from an older revision along with some other directories checked out from a newer revision. Another advantage is that it's a lot easier to type in a revision number (which is usually some five or six digit number) than a SHA-1 hash. For example if a bug happens in revision 56384, I can tell a coworker to update to 56384, and that's easy. This is a lot easier than yelling across the hallway, "it's in 832e76a9899f560a90ffd62ae2ce83bbeff58f54." This would require an IM or an e-mail at the least.
In general I think a lot of projects have a timeline where code develops and becomes better and more complex, and most developers want to have the latest source. In these situations git is just very difficult to deal with, because it is not really designed with this idea in mind.
I love how Slashdot is the kind of site where one can refer in a subject *and* the article summary itself to just "Linus" and we all know who the person's talking about.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
From what I recall as both a Linux and BSD hack at the time, the boost to Linux was the earlier addition of an IDE interface, not licensing. BSD required a (more expensive and thus more rare) SCSI controller for much longer which limited the number of users (which then had some effect on developers).
Same for partitioning, to this day BSD still requires a primary partition, which means potentially more trouble for users to install.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Just a question, not trying to flame really, but why does anyone care what Linus thinks? I like using OSS, I wrote OSS libaries myself. But honestly, why should I care what Linus thinks? It's a community effort. Not like he wrote the entire kernel, let alone 100s of libraries I use each day.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I like his comment about "rotating" media. What a disdainful term that will become. It immediately made me picture my nine-yr-old son teasing me in 10 years because I still have stuff on my lame rotating media.
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but when I first looked into git, I was left with the impression that there was /no way/ to use git as if it were centralized: every user had to have the full history, even if 99.99% of that history was irrelevant. I recall reading something where Linus noticed that if everyone used git with full history, they would all wind up with needlessly huge local copies. His solution: rather than fixing this obvious flaw in git, he chose instead to simply not import old version information. Did I read this wrong? Has something changed? These are not rhetorical questions, I have asked them previously and have yet to receive an answer. I just don't know. Why is git superior when it seems that it was fundamentally incapable of handling the full depth of the very project for which it was written?
My goal of a "perfect" version control system is one that is decentralized, but lets me decide how much history I want, and lets me decide if something is so old as to be irrelevant, not worth having locally. If older versions can be discarded without impacting day-to-day work, why have I not seen this as an option for any decentralized systems?
It is one of those "seems obvious enough to me that I am probably just using the wrong keywords in Google" things.
SVN lets me check out just the "most recent" copy, and I can pull whatever I need from the remote repository if I need it.
git, from what I've read, does not.
I am not trying to be arrogant here, I would love to be corrected. Given history of other times I've asked this question, I don't expect to.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
To the best of my knowledge, you are correct that every Git user has the entire history.
This is really a non-issue, though. Storage is cheap and the history doesn't take up that much space.
The 2.6 kernel takes about 285MB and the entire 2 year history is about 187MB. The initial release was in 1991 - 16 years ago. Assuming 187MB every two years (which is certainly a gross overestimate) that's still less than 3GB. Not exactly small, but not obscenely huge either by today's standards. But it's not even that bad. You can get the entire kernel bitkeeper history here in under 200MB (which is still comfortably smaller than the kernel, itself).
The repository size wasn't even the reason that Linus gave for not importing the history. If memory serves, I believe it was more of a technical issue of correctly importing the history from bitkeeper and patches.
But here's an honest question.
If a person refuses to use a given technology, how can he meaningfully criticize that same technology? Give me a guy who's been using CVS for a decade and wants to vent, and I'll listen.
a brief googling reveals hard drive space was not the issue - it was bandwidth. My point is more related to archives in general, not the linux kernel itself, though (that Linus chose not to put the whole tree into git I still think is very telling, though). My primary concern is: if it wasn't worth it to have 3-year-old history THEN, why not three years from then? It just seems like a fundamental design issue that I've never heard explained other than "hard disks are cheap and bandwidth is infinite nowadays!", which is an outright lie and pretty much just says "git: not meant to be portable" /like/ to be able to check out/in from resource-limited systems without resorting to YetAnotherTool.
Perhaps I use SVN in situations where something simpler would suffice, but I
mostly, though, it's just the idea of "we don't want to import 3 years of history, it's not worth it right now" + "And this is good for the long term!"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Any chance you could post a link to something that says that Linus didn't import the entire history because of bandwidth issue? Everything I could find seemed to suggest it was just the difficulty of importing the history. This really matters because If it was a technical issue, then your argument loses quite a bit of its potency.
I understand that you were speaking about archives, in general, but the kernel is a great test case considering its size and its rate of development.
You're more than welcome to use SVN if it suites you. Makes no difference to me one way or another. Heck - I still have to use it for some projects myself because integrated Eclipse support isn't there yet for Git.
All I'm saying is that you shouldn't discount Git out of hand just because of some perceived issue of bandwidth and storage without trying it out for yourself. If you're working on something modestly sized (on the order of a few megs), you could realistically do it over dialup (I wouldn't envy you, but you could do it... though, if you're the sort of person who needs version control, it seems unlikely that you'd be stuck with something as slow as dialup)
This was very quick googling, of the type "I think I remember reading something like...", typing "linus git kernel import", and clicking until I found something similar to my memory, total time 20 seconds:
/ALWAYS/ in a situation where I have a lot of bandwidth and hard disk space at my disposal. When I'm in a resource-limited situation, I still like to be able to check in/out, do other "what went wrong?" type of things without using a second system.
/when they wanted it/.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/5014
Just because I'm the type of person who uses version control and often have access to high-speed internet and large hard drives doesn't mean I'm
As for "give it a try", I did, but very early in its history so I don't think enough niceties were there at the time.
Mostly, it comes down to: sometimes my SVN repository grows very quickly due to all the sometimes unneeded history. There's no "svn obliterate", so we just put up with it. This causes (actual, not hypothetical) storage issues even with centralized version control. I wouldn't want to multiply this problem by the number of developers, while adding bandwidth issues previously not dealt with because some things they just didn't care about, just to allow them access to histories
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Thanks for the link. I agree it's pretty sad if that was a primary motivation for not importing the whole tree. Fixing that seems like it might take a significant redesign (although I imagine that there's a way that you could automatically merge incomplete histories).
It occurs to me that when you're in a bandwidth-limited situation (say on a trip with your notebook), distributed systems like Git might actually work better for you. When you have access to a high-speed connection, you can do the more expensive push/pull. When you don't, you can just rely on the local repository - even when you don't have an internet connection.
You didn't RTFA did you? Linus doesn't state that something is better then something else in absolute terms. It's his opinion and his opinion matters regardless of what you think. He will switch to GPLv3 if it suits him but he disagrees with the philosophy of GPLv3. I happen to agree with his decision but like him, I'll use it if it's practical. If you must know, one thing he dislikes about GPLv3 is the "No DRM" type clause. I agree that that's a bad clause but it's not a big deal. He focuses more on the technological side of things. Just because some fans follow his every word doesn't mean his word is worthless. Also, not everyone that happens agrees with him or respect his opinion is blindly following his word.
for situations where I'll _never_ have high-speed or (more importantly) lots of hard disk space, this doesn't work. Can I only check out certain branches without getting every branch it's related to? (or even "those which aren't technically related, but are in the same repository"?)
/could/ work for me (potentially), so long as I re-branched every now and then.
Being an SVN user I am probably stuck in the mindset of not distinguishing much between branches, revisions, and directories, as far as relationships go. If I could check out only a certain "branch" without checking out what it's related to, git
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Absolutely.
Actually... I almost mentioned that before but I wasn't sure that that was *quite* the solution for you (to the extent that it does help though, it's in there).