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Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

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Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#191

Post by burfog »

luckydude wrote: post #123
bcantrill wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is my understanding, yes -- but the NSE and (McVoy-authored) NSElite chapters of the saga pre-date me at Sun. Before my "Fork Yeah!" talk[1][2], from which this is drawn, I confirmed this the best I could, but it was all based only on recollections of the engineers who were there (including Larry). I haven't found anything written down about (for example) NSElite, though I would love to get Larry on the record t…

The NSE was Suns attempt at a grand SCM system and it was miserably slow (single threaded fuse like COW file system implemented in user space). I did performance work back then, sort of a jack of all trades (filesystem, vm system, networking, you name it) so Sun asked me to look at it. I did and recoiled in horror, it wasn't well thought out for performance. My buddies in the kernel group were actually starting to qu…

You weren't the only one to do SCCS over NFS. The real-time computer division of Harris did it too. That version control system was already considered strange and old by 2004 when I encountered it.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#192

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

luckydude wrote: post #32
to3m wrote: post #18

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 think that bitkeeper could fill in the enterprise niche (like perforce or clearcase) - very big organisations with a lot of developers don't like it that every developer can check out the whole source tree. They usually like to have access control by department/group. Also stuff like 'read only access' or 'right to commit' can be added for greater bureaucratic bliss.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#193

Post by sdesol »

luckydude wrote: post #6
okket wrote: post #3

There is an official mirror on GitHub: https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper

It's a read only mirror, the read/write mirror is on bkbits.net. But we'll maintain the mirror (or you can, bk has fast-export which creates a perfect mirror in git).

Would you describe the exporting process to git, pretty painless? If so, I'll look at adding bitkeeper support for my git analytics/search tool. I've uploaded some pictures that shows what the git repos that you have hosted on GitHub looks like at:

http://imgur.com/a/nVvov

Since the export process adds "bk: " to the commit comment, it'll be easy to tell that it was created via your fast-export tool, which means my tool can easily point you back to the bitkeeper web interface.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#194

Post by burfog »

luckydude wrote: post #141
ashitlerferad wrote: post #139

Too late :)

You and a lot of other people say that. Sure, if we want to take over from Git, it's late. But Git has left us with an opening, the only way Git works for the masses is Github, Git itself is too complicated and people "lose" their data (they don't but Git makes it appear like they did). I think people will play with BK and find out that it can work for everyone without something like Github (we still need it but it's…

Nah, it's easy. Before every git command, I just tar up the source. When git complains, I can untar to get things working again. To work with others, I fetch a new tree and then use "diff" and "patch" to merge my changes into the new tree.

(seriously, as an experienced professional developer, I actually do this much of the time)

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#195

Post by retr0h »

luckydude wrote: post #134
caf wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably if you then delete that first line in the third version, you get something like ^AI 1 this is the first line in the first version. ^AE 1 ^AD 3 ^AI 2 this is the line that was added in the second version ^AE 2 ?

Close. By the way there is a bk _scat command (sccs cat, not poop) that dumps the ascii file format so you can try this and see. The delete needs to be an envelope around the insert so you get ^AD 3 ^AI 1 this is the first line in the first version. ^AE 1 ^AE 3 ^AI 2 this is the line that was added in the second version ^AE 2 That whole weave thing is really cool. The only person outside of BK land that got it was Br…

SUN must like the scat names :) I used to use scat tool for debugging core files.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#196

Post by teddyh »

BitMover still holds all the copyright, and have all the developers. They obviously wanted to keep BitKeeper proprietary, and are only doing it now when facing irrelevance in the marketplace. If BitKeeper becomes popular again, who’s to say they won't take development proprietary again? Sure, the community could fork the latest free version, but there isn’t a free development community for BitKeeper – they’re all internal to BitMover.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#197

Post by kingosticks » 

    "The ability to seamlessly share only a subset of your source tree "
I've spent a good 10 mins trying to find anything specific in the documentation about this but come up empty. Is this just by virtue of using submodules, ssh and filesystem permissions or is there something more that I'm yet to find? The lack of fine grain security on modern VCS systems is one of the reasons our monolithic repository is still using CVS.

On a related note, the getting started documentation should be more prominent on the Web page.

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#198

Post by Annatar »

The biggest feature for me is the efficient handling of large binary files, because it means I could finally have a completely self-contained repository (clone and everything is in one place, plus free replication), but without the performance penalties which for example Mercurial incurs with binary files:

https://www.bitkeeper.org/why.html

I have to try it out just for that!

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#199

Post by Annatar »

bcantrill wrote: post #37

The grand irony is that Larry was one of the earliest advocates of open sourcing the operating system at Sun[1] -- and believed that by the time Sun finally collectively figured it out and made it happen (in 2005), it was a decade or more too late.[2] So on the one hand, you can view the story of BitKeeper with respect to open source as almost Greek in its tragic scope: every reason that Larry outlined for "sourcewar…

> And you can say to BK and Larry now that it's "too late", just as Larry told Sun in 2005,

In case of software, it is never too late: as you once put it so eloquently, software does not suddenly stop working and does not have an expiration date.

If this software works and works well, then Paul Graham's revolutionary idea of when you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best applies. (Common sense really, but apparently not to the rest of our industry.)

If this software will work the best, and do exactly what I want and need it to do, I have enough experience to know not to care that everyone else runs something like git just because that is trendy right now. (A lesson appreciated by those who run SmartOS because it is the best available technology for virtualization, cloud, and performance, instead of running Linux and Docker.)

Re: Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

#200

Post by ajb »

peonicles wrote: post #69
adharmad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for contributing to the development and evangalizing of DVCS, directly (BK) and indirectly (the ideas and inspiration for git, hg).

It's probably fair to say the DVCS accelerated the growth of the entire software industry. Was BitKeeper the first version control system to "think distributed" ?

There was a paper published on a DVCS using UUCP (!) in 1980: "A distributed version control system for wide area networks " B O Donovan, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...
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