Re: Bitkeeper

Zack Brown
2003-07-20T02:36:22Z

Hi folks,

On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 03:51:36PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > If you are trying to copy BK, give it up. We'll simply follow in the
> > footsteps of every other company faced with this sort of thing and change
> > the protocol every 6 months. Since you would be chasing us you can never
> > catch up. If you managed to stay close then we'd put digital signatures
> > into the protocol to prevent your clone from interoperating with BK.
>
> I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client
> that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching
> to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice:
> if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community
> that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.

I'm against Richard inflaming the situation without really helping, but since
the issue's come up again, I just thought I'd put in a good word for arch here:

The arch project is no longer just a bunch of shell scripts. Tom
Lord has rewritten it in C (and called the C version 'tla'), and it's
self-hosting. Developers are actually contributing to development using arch
itself now. These seem like very big milestones to me.

There's still quite a bit of work to do on it (and a steep learning curve), but
personally, I think it's the project with the best chance of success. Anyone
who's interested in this issue might consider contributing to arch development
instead of duking it out on lkml.

Be well,
Zack

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--
Zack Brown