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I'm wondering: how does it handle large binary files? Any better than git or hg without extensions?
You can have a cloud of servers so the binaries are "close" (think China, India, US).
1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330482 What changed? Is BitKeeper still an ongoing business with some other model, or is that, as they say... it? I hope not.
Too late? Maybe. But we had a viable business that was pulling in millions/year. The path to giving away our stuff seemed like:
step 1: give it away
step 2: ???
step 3: profit!
Will it work? No idea. We have a couple of years to find out. If nothing pans out, open sourcing it seemed like a better answer than selling it off.
Interesting — FreeBSD 7 and 8 binaries available for download. Neither of those is a current supported release. It's like offering RHEL 3 or 4 binaries.
Really they are Debian 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 but they match up with Redhat pretty well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wouldn't, unless you have very specific niche needs. They're pretty upfront about it: >Why use BitKeeper when there are lots of great alternatives? >For many projects, the answer is: you shouldn’t. https://www.bitkeeper.org/why.html
Probably the single biggest reason, aside from it's easier to use than git's CLI, is that it has sub-modules that work exactly like files do in a repository. No extra options, just clone/pull/push/commit/etc. Full on distributed workflow. BitKeeper itself is a collection of repositories. Download an install image, install, and clone it: $ bk clone http://bkbits.net/u/bk/bugfix $ cd bugfix $ bk here PRODUCT default $…
See large repo support, security and others.
Is that geared towards comparing with Git/Github? Is there a more focused comparison with those. i.e. both comparing to git itself and to GaaS (Git as a Service).
1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330482 What changed? Is BitKeeper still an ongoing business with some other model, or is that, as they say... it? I hope not.
This is to answer this question and all the "too late" comments. Too late? Maybe. But we had a viable business that was pulling in millions/year. The path to giving away our stuff seemed like: step 1: give it away step 2: ??? step 3: profit! And still does. So what changed? Git/Github has all the market share. Trying to compete with that just proved to be too hard. So rather than wait until we were about to turn out…
I'm also interested how open-sourcing BK will improve the other systems, too.
So congratulations to Larry and crew -- and damn, were you ever right in 1993! ;)
[1] Seriously, read this: http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/unix/srcos.html
[2] The citation here is, in that greatest of all academic euphemisms, "Personal communication."
[3] "Sourceware" because [1] predates the term "open source"
For people who don't know the history -- McVoy offered free bitkeeper licenses to various open source projects, and the Linux kernel switched to it. After Andrew Tridgell (SAMBA, among other projects) reverse-engineered the bitkeeper protocol [1] in order to create his own client, the license was rescinded for everyone. As a result, Linus wrote git. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/
As I remember it, it was a bit of a douche move by Tridgell, driven by a Stallman-like free software ideology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably the single biggest reason, aside from it's easier to use than git's CLI, is that it has sub-modules that work exactly like files do in a repository. No extra options, just clone/pull/push/commit/etc. Full on distributed workflow. BitKeeper itself is a collection of repositories. Download an install image, install, and clone it: $ bk clone http://bkbits.net/u/bk/bugfix $ cd bugfix $ bk here PRODUCT default $…
It claims to be able to handle binary files well which would be a big deal to game development. They have mostly passed on git and mercurial since they can't handle game assets.
The about only difference is that git prefers the whole history and you cannot yet set per submodule shallow clone policy. It wouldn't even be too hard to add that.
At the very least, Bryan Cantrill will be happy :-D.