Re: [Savannah-hackers] Fighting BitKeeper: There is no such thing as a Free Lunch

[Shlomi Fish]

On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Jaime E. Villate wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 01:35:11PM +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > At the moment the situation in the free software world is that two
> > alternatives with public hosting exist:
> >
> > 1. CVS - old, reliable but a pain to work with. Fully Free.
> >
> > 2. BitKeeper - very good, and a joy to work with. Distributed under a very
> > restrictive license.
> BitKeeper is not free software, therefore it is not an alternative.
>

I think you erroneously believed that "use only free software" idealism is
shared by all free software developers out there. That is far from being
the case. It is not the case for me and it is not the case for most of the
FS developers I personally know. I know a few free software bigots but at
least one is also using BitKeeper.

BitKeeper _is_ an alternative.

> > You need to make some effort in raising a Subversion
> > server, if you want people to ditch BitKeeper for good (and for the
> > Subversion development to accelerate - more users = more development[1])
> getting people "to ditch BitKeeper for good" is not one of our aims.
> Our target audience are not the users of BitKeeper or any other proprietary
> software.
>

I see my battle as a way to get a truly comfortable, and nice SCM into the
open. BitKeeper is that, but it is too restrictive. Subversion is that
too, but it has no public hosting. CVS is not that. It is a pain to work
with: you cannot copy files, you cannot move or rename them, merging is a
pain, commits are non-atomic, etc.

> > If you OTOH reject Subversion because it is not straightforward to install
> > on your Debian Stable (%-)) systems, then it will take much longer time
> > for it to develop, and meanwhile innocent developers will be lured into
> > the BitKeeper and bkbits.net service (which are excellent except for the
> > bad licensing).
> Savannah users value free software for the ideals it defends and not for its
> technical superiority. I'm sure they will not mind waiting a few more days
> until subversion leaves its alpha state and it can be recommended for
> day-to-day use without any risk of loosing their data.
>

Subversion respositories can be dumped and then backed up. I think
Subversion should be used now when it is in Beta Stage, out of the
"release early - release often" concept. The more people use your
software, even if it is potentially buggy, the faster its development
goes, and you are advnacing more.

Some Savannah users are just looking for hosting for thier projects and
don't care too much about ideals. And some (like me) will greatly
appreciate something better than CVS.

> > Note that Aegis and Arch do not give a sufficient answer to CVS, BitKeeper
> > or Subversion.
> But a lot of Savannah users have requested them and since they seem to be
> stable enough, we will proceed to install them in Savannah.
>

Very well, I think it is a good idea. Both are more straightforward to
install than Subversion. However, I did not find any of them more
convenient. Subversion, CVS and BitKeeper work very similarly and Arch and
especially Aegis seem to deviate from it.

I personally am looking for Subversion hosting because I like Subversion.

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

> Regards,
> Jaime
>



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        address@hidden
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.