> From: Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Jon Smirl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: Sourceforge CVS, was Re: [Dri-devel] radeon error > > On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Jon Smirl wrote: > > Having used CVS and BitKeeper, BitKeeper is way better. > > I will just add a big "Amen, Brother!" to that.
Thanks, Linus. We certainly try to make BK be a lot better than CVS or anything else. If it wasn't I'd expect more flames about that than the license. We may not be as polished as some Windows based whatever but BK is a tool designed by engineers for engineers. Our goal is to make you more productive, as much as that sounds like marketing drivel. > Yes, BitKeeper has license issues, and some people won't touch it. Over time we have a plan to make this go away. The main reason that there have been license issues is that we had a goal to give the latest and greatest out for free, that's how we could help open source the most. All the other companies give you an old buggy version or a stripped down (no GUIs or whatever) version, etc. We really wanted to give our best out for free but that meant we had to protect our IP more than those other companies. We've heard that people would rather have better licensing terms than more features so we've forked the tree and when the commercial version is sufficiently ahead of the free version we'll revise the license to be something that people like or at least can live with. I want to be crystal clear: the licensing problems are because we wanted to give you more, they are not because we sit around going "how can we annoy people today?". Rather than people focussing on what we gave them, they have focussed on the licensing issues. OK, no problem, we're trying to do what people want, we'll give them the better licensing terms they want. But it means they get less than the commercial guys get. Maybe that's an OK tradeoff, people seem pretty happy with BK as stands right now and people understand that tradeoff. People do not understand our desire to help as much as we can, it's too altruistic and people have deep seated distrust of that sort of thing. > But there are CVS/SVN gateways for that, and the kernel people (who I think > tend to be more religious about licenses than the average XFree86 person) > seem to have finally accepted it. We'd be happy to do the CVS gateway for you. It's very cool, I can go on and on about how it works but I won't bore you (if you care, send me mail). We can also offer a fast public machine on which to work if you need that. DaveM has to OK that but he's pretty happy to help people doing real work. > I can also say that bkbits.net has been well maintained and responsive > when there have been issues. And the nice thing about true distribution is > that you are _not_ dependent on one single site anyway. bkbits.net has > just been a very convenient one - but the fact that we don't have to > absolutely _rely_ on it still makes everybody just so much more confident > about it. I'll underscore this. BK is completely replicated. Every workspace has local revision history and if you ever decided that bkbits.net was a pain you have *100%, no exceptions* of the data we have on bkbits.net. So there is no reason you can't set up mirrors. bkbits.net is a *cache*, not the authoritative source. You are the authoritative source. In the case of the Linux kernel, we're not the source, Linus is the source, we're just a useful public cache of the source. The whole sourceforge/CVS model is busted because it gives the owner of the CVS repository way too much power. We host tons of repositories on bkbits but that's fine, we have no power, the repositories are replicated. People will use bkbits.net as long as we are reasonable and when we aren't there is absolutely nothing preventing people from moving off. We did that on purpose. It's part of the BK model. It also keeps us honest. We can't screw you because if we do you have no reason not to just walk away. It's the ultimate in feedback loops. > So if you can get over the learning curve, over the license (and - for > some people - over Larry McVoy's personality), then BK is really a > wonderful thing. Geeze, thanks :( Actually, I'm aware that my personality is not an asset. Some people like it but some don't and that's fine. If helping the DRI folks meant they dealt with one of the other people here, that's fine, we have lots of bright people, Linus can vouch for that, he knows some of them. I've copied Wayne Scott, he came from Intel's processor group, he's sharp and has a better user interface if that's what is important. I'm coming into this discussion late and you may have already figured out what it is you want to do. The only reason I'm here is that several of the Linux kernel guys sent me mail saying your project is important, you are a fit for BK, and I should go reassure you that we want to help. That's good enough for me, if you want our help, cool, we're smaller than sourceforge and we focus on projects that are doing something, it's a quality versus quantity thing. If we can help, let us know. If not, no worries, we're here if you change your mind and if not, best of luck. It's clear that some sharp people think what you are doing is important. If it would help we could grab your CVS root and import it into BK and make that available. You could poke around with BK and see if you like it, I'd be happy to walk people through that if they want. Cheers, --lm ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
