Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:48:27 -0500 From: Pedro Giffuni <pfg@FreeBSD.org> To: chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: What Larry McVoy (bitkeeper) got wrong .... Message-ID: <44e4450e-8dbb-f401-bd5c-df503f7a4ef8@FreeBSD.org>
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Hello; I was in the process of preparing a port of bitkeeper and I found this: https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper "The BitKeeper history needs to be written up but the short version is that it happened because Larry wanted to help Linux not turn into a bunch of splintered factions like 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, etc. He saw that the problem was one of tooling. ..." This actually made me laugh. Wrong problem and wrong tool to "fix" it. While CVS could have been seen as the wrong tool for just about anything, FreeBSD could have used perforce for "free" and still we would have a similar situation. The underlying issues IMHO was that of community affinity and developer interests, not of tooling. Back in the early days, the "splintering" of the BSDs might have been seen as an issue but as I see it now, it has been a blessing. I for one have no interest in adopting the OpenBSD approach towards security, to name just something some developers see as interesting, but I do see the idea of different teams trying new things critical, and I do take a lot of code from the other BSDs. Version control, and in particular *distributed* version control, actually makes forking easier, but curiously some of the BSDs have found it very difficult to get away from CVS. I guess we should be thankful about the new tooling but if the idea was to prevent linux to become like the BSDs (for good or bad), I think the linux community is to credit for that. Just my $0.02, Pedro.
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