Re: [PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper documentation from Linux tree

Daniel Phillips
2002-04-20T19:19:54Z

On Saturday 20 April 2002 20:48, Russell King wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 08:15:14PM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > All of what you said, 100% agreed, and insightful, in particular:
> >
> > On Saturday 20 April 2002 19:53, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > > I can see the potential for this to break down. However we should
> > > not be crying wolf until this actually does break down.
> >
> > Do we want it to break down first? I don't want that.
>
> Actually, you yourself have probably sewn the first seeds of the community
> breaking down. Lets take a moment to put some thought in at this point
> and review what's happened today.
>
> 1. The Current Situation
>
> - Linus uses BK
> - Linus makes his BK tree available.
> - Linus makes GNU patches available.
> - Linus accepts requests to pull from BK trees.
> - Linus accepts GNU patches to apply to his BK tree.
>
> 2. The effect of today
>
> - You've highlighted a problem
> - David Woodhouse and Rik van Riel have written a tool to grab Linus'
> BK tree and turn it into a patch on a per-hourly basis
>
> Now look back at Linus' actions above. There is now redundancy. Linus
> doesn't have to put out GNU patches anymore because someone else is
> doing that for him... which means Linus works more efficiently.
>
> So it's highly likely that in the future, we'll have:
>
> - Linus uses BK
> - Linus makes his BK tree available
> - Linus accepts requests to pull from BK trees.
> - Linus accepts GNU patches to apply to his BK tree.
> - "Select few" pull his BK tree and create GNU patches for others
> to use.

Use for what? I'm not clear on this concept.

> Oops. We've just split the community further, which is *completely* the
> opposite of what you wanted to achieve. I wonder what the next stage
> will be...

Now you're crying wolf. Since when has developing and trying out tools
been bad?

> Like I said to you on IRC before you posted the message - you want
> to fix the problem at the root (ie, Linus) rather than your apparant
> problem with the "two communities." And how do you do that? You
> discuss it with the person concerned. (And you can see the results
> of that discussion earlier in this thread.)

Sorry, the only way I know of debating is in public. Perhaps I can
learn another way, but I'm not sure I want to.

> This way, those that want to use "a distributed source control system
> of some type" can do so, and those that want to use the GNU patch/diff
> method can also continue to, but with The Latest Tree available.
> Which has got to be an advantage for *everyone*.
>
> I'm sorry, I have no cares for people who have been constantly whinging
> at the users of BK who don't go out of their way to find out where the
> real problem is and attempt to fix that, rather than harp on about how
> other people shouldn't be using a non-free tool.

Please show me where I said anyone should not use Bitkeeper.

> Oh, and before anyone says that I'm another one who uses BK, yes I do
> use BK, but only as a method of getting ARM specific changes into Linus.
> Any generic kernel changes I have still go to linux-kernel, Linus and
> any relevant other people as a GNU patch. The first time these patches
> see BK is when they hit Linus' BK tree. They don't come from BK either.
>
> I, therefore, can claim to work in both domains in parallel.
>
> But no, in your eyes, I'm just another stupid BK person who's contributing
> to the downfall of Linux, and is in the "in" club.

Not at all, you're just the ARM guy. <- funny, laugh

--
Daniel