Re: Petition Against Official Endorsement of BitKeeper by Linux Maintainers

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 09:54:34AM -0500, Kent Borg wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 04:51:23PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > BitKeeper is a non-trivial project, it has:
> > 	* close to 200 commands, with about 800 different options.
> 
> When I was recently doing some PPC work I used Bitkeeper (because PPC
> folks do) and I didn't like it.  It was so complicated to use, hell,
> seemed like there were 200 commands with 800 options.  And when I
> couldn't get it to correctly export a tree I couldn't tell if I was
> doing it wrong or it was a bug.

And apparently you didn't file a bug because I just looked in the bug
database.  Was typing "bk sendbug" too difficult?

> I can appreciate that the problem BK tries to solve is a big one with
> subtleties that have to get done right, and, as I type this on my
> notebook sitting in front of my work computer, I wish CVS were
> distributed.  But I am not convinced BK is as elegant in its design as
> it could be, I *know* it is not as elegant in its user interface as it
> could be.

There are *lots* of things in BK that aren't as good as they could be.
If you want them better, you need to complain about them.

> I also dislike the irony of BK being proprietary.  Sure, they might
> have an enlightened and generous attitude not, but PGP used to be
> free, then it became kinda free and then it became orphaned.  Luckily
> GPG came along, luckily PGP didn't have a monoploy on our history.

PGP didn't have a business model, we do, and part of our business model
is to give it away to some of the world.  It's a good business model,
BK is dramatically better because the PPC team used it and Cort went
through all sorts of stuff as BK improved.  BK would easily be a year
back in terms of usefulness if it weren't for Cort and there is no way
he would have been using it if we charged for it.  We get something by
letting people use it for free.  It's part of our business model and
it works.
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm