Re: BK kernel workflow

Andrea Arcangeli
2004-10-25T18:04:17Z

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 09:10:47AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I doubt arch is there today either, but hey, if it displaces CVS, I
> certainyl won't complain. How are the gcc people doing with it?

gcc people are stuck with CVS AFIK. Apparently CVS is good enough for
them.

arch isn't ready for prime time with the kernel. It would be ready if we
were ok to limit it to say 5000 changesets and to obsolete the older
changesets once in a while. the backend needs a rewrite to handle that.

Thanks to various improvements we did (I only did one that allows
caching with hardlinked trees, Chris and others did more), probably arch
would be already way faster than BK in a daily checkout checkin and
cloning (nobody on the open source side can verify since we cannot use
BK, AFIK Miles tried to buy a copy of BK but Larry refused to sell it,
but I seriously doubt BK has such an advanced hardlinking cache
mechanism like arch), but the very first setup on a new machine would be
very inefficient (if compared to CVS) and the local copy of the
repository would take more space (again if compared to CVS).

The user interface isn't nice either, it'd be nicer at least to avoid
overlaps between commands.

I believe this all can be fixed, it just needs a critical mass of users
and some big initial pain.