Re: Linux 2.4 and BitKeeper

Linus Torvalds
2002-03-15T19:23:15Z

On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> By "your way" you mean "the current way", right? In which case, the future
> option I described is OK, right? Or am I still missing something?

No, the future option looks fine. I suspect that when you go for a real
integrated database, you'll automatically get all the features I like.

> I used the user level NFS server and you could do a
>
> mount -o ro,rev=v.2.5.5 -tnfs /home/BK/repository/xxxx v2.5.5
>
> and it worked just fine. I personally hate this because there is no way that
> I have ever seen to make filesystem semantics == SCM semantics. It turns into
> a hack for read/write. If it made you happy to do this for read only, hey,
> there's a nice newbie project.

The thing is, I think that the "work area" really is overrated.

There's no reason to have a work area at all if you just had:
- read-only filesystem for grep/make (autogenerated)
- separate commands for editing

I don't find it depressing at all to have to use "bk editor" to edit a
file. I just aliased that one, and I'm all done. That's why I don't think
that the filesystem interface should have revisions or writeability: once
you get into those things, the filesystem abstractions simply aren't valid
any more.

But reading the current contents (as opposed to reading some revision) of
the thing _is_ a perfectly valid thing to do, where the FS interfaces do
actually map perfectly.

> Whoops, sorry, try it with -Ur, the -U says "user files only, skip the BK crud"

That's better. It doesn't fix the pipe example, though. You're missing the
-l option to grep etc..

Linus