Re: Petition Against Official Endorsement of BitKeeper by Linux Maintainers

From: Kent Borg (kentborg@borg.org)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 09:54:34 EST


On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 04:51:23PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> BitKeeper is a non-trivial project, it has:
> * close to 200 commands, with about 800 different options.

When I was recently doing some PPC work I used Bitkeeper (because PPC
folks do) and I didn't like it. It was so complicated to use, hell,
seemed like there were 200 commands with 800 options. And when I
couldn't get it to correctly export a tree I couldn't tell if I was
doing it wrong or it was a bug.

I can appreciate that the problem BK tries to solve is a big one with
subtleties that have to get done right, and, as I type this on my
notebook sitting in front of my work computer, I wish CVS were
distributed. But I am not convinced BK is as elegant in its design as
it could be, I *know* it is not as elegant in its user interface as it
could be.

I also dislike the irony of BK being proprietary. Sure, they might
have an enlightened and generous attitude not, but PGP used to be
free, then it became kinda free and then it became orphaned. Luckily
GPG came along, luckily PGP didn't have a monoploy on our history.

-kb
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 07 2002 - 21:00:55 EST