On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 10:07:43PM +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > I should add that by "CVS" I meant any decent source control system and > BitKeepter seems to fit this description. This is definitely good news. I > don't know what role my post played in Linus' decision, though.
I haven't seen your post anywhere in LKML so far, so probably not much. It most likely was triggered by Rob Landley's "Patch Penguin" post and the uberflamewar that followed it. One of the threads had Linus and Larry Mcvoy (the BitKeeper guy) discussing its relative merits. In any case, Rob Landley's suggestion was rejected flat out by Linus, and BitKeeper isn't relevant to it. Rob Landley didn't want source control per se, he wanted a different (or more explicit) development hierarchy and patch routes, which he didn't get. About half of the developers, by very rought count (but including Alan Cox), supported Rob's suggestion or at least agreed that something needed to change, and the other half said that things were just fine as they were, thankyouverymuch. > The point of the mutiny was that people should have abandoned the original > way of maintaining the patches, regardless of Linus' approval. But now > that he uses it himself, there isn't much point in it. It's good to know > Linus is not as senseless and stubborn as I believed he was, originally. Actually, Linus and BitKeeper go quite a few years back. Linus has always been intending to try it out some day, when he has time, or when BitKeeper is good enough, or when it gets one more feature, and so on and so on. So he finall got around to it. The /really/ interesting thing about this whole story, at least as far as I am concerned, is that it shows that Linus /is/ afterall prone to changing his mind when faced with massive developer pressure. > I discovered other things I don't like about the way the kernel was > maintained since the original mutiny call, but they are relatively minor > in comparison to using a source control system. I thought you mostly wanted Linus to let maintainers apply their own patches without his control. Looks like he won't even consider that, though, or at least, I haven't seen it ever being brought up on LKML. Mostly his use of BitKeeper doesn't affect anyone at the moment either for good or for bad -- he still applies patches and releases prepatches and all this stuff, just like ha always has. The main difference is that now BitKeeper is generating his changelogs and other information, which makes his work more transparent -- a good thing in itself. But Linus said that if BitKeeper proves to be a good tool he will start accpeting patches for review through the BitKeeper system and not only by mail as he is doing now. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
