Re: [RFC] Linux Kernel Subversion Howto

Nicolas Pitre
2005-02-09T17:31:24Z

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Larry McVoy wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 05:06:02AM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> > So you've somehow managed to trick most kernel developers into
> > granting you power over not only the BK history
>
> It's exactly the same as a file system. If you put some files into a
> file system does the file system creator owe you the knowledge of how
> those files are maintained in the file system?

No, this is not a good analogy at all.

If I don't want to use a certain filesystem, I mount it and copy the
files over to another filesystem. What users are interested in are the
files themselves of course, and the efficiency with which the filesystem
handles those files. BK is the efficient filesystem here, but anyone
should be able to freely copy files over to another filesystem without
any need for the filesystem internals knowledge. If the target
filesystem is 8.3 without lowercase support then so be it and people
will need to use a separate file to hold the extra details that cannot
berepresented natively in the target filesystem. But absolutely 0% of
the information is lost.

Again, the BK value is in the efficiency and reliability it has to
handle a tree like the Linux kernel, not in the Linux kernel tree. It's
not necessary for you to give away that value in order to provide the
simple information needed to reconstruct the Linux tree structure as
people are asking.

Nicolas