Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bitkeeper.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–309 of 309 posts

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

#301

Post by JdeBP »

prirun wrote: post #166

I think the same points made in Larry's 1993 paper could be made about various Linux distributions: Why a gazillion package managers? Why not a common filesystem layout? Why not a standard desktop? IMO, Linus should enforce his Linux trademark by forcing every distribution to follow a set of standards. If they don't, they can't call it "Linux". If he got them in a room and said "This is the way it's going to be, or e…

The people that you are looking for are the systemd and FreeDesktop people. The former have a manifesto addressing this:

> The emphasis of systemd to provide a platform instead of just a component allows for closer integration, and cleaner APIs. Sooner or later this will trickle up to the applications. Already, there are accepted XDG specifications [...] that are not supported on the other init systems.

> systemd is also a big opportunity for Linux standardization. Since it standardizes many interfaces of the system that previously have been differing on every distribution, on every implementation, adopting it helps to work against the balkanization of the Linux interfaces.

-- http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/why.html

They have a systemd filesystem layout that they say modernizes the FHS:

* https://freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/file-hierarchy....

They have a project to rearchitect packaging:

* http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...

They have the aforementioned specifications:

* https://specifications.freedesktop.org/

* https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/

They have a systemd DNS client:

* https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/writing-re...

They even have events where people get in a room to be told "the way it's going to be":

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519578

* https://ti.to/systemdconf/systemdconf-2016

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

#302

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Annatar wrote: post #295
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems that my innocent suggestion that Linux isn't perfect may have spawned a tiny... massive holy war. Great. You know what? SmartOS is fantastic. It's great. But Linux isn't terrible. They both have their flaws. Like SmartOS not having a large binary footprint, and not having the excellent package repositories. And the fact that every partisan of one hates /proc on the other. And the fact that KVM is from lin…

> Like SmartOS not having a large binary footprint, and not having the excellent package repositories. http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.ht... > And the fact that KVM is from linux. Actually that's great that it's from Linux, because one major point of embarrassment for Linux is that KVM runs faster and better on SmartOS than it does on Linux, because Joyent engineers systematically used DTrac…

...Annnd the BSDs involved. Now all we need is some actual fans, and the Linux hackers should start to retaliate...

But good to know that the Solaris and BSD NVIDIA drivers work. If they work with lx-branding, I might actually consider running the thing.

>Once you're able to afford one, you won't care about the desktop every again, because your desktop will JustWork(SM).

Yeah, no. It seems like OSX is making increasingly radical changes that make it increasingly hard for applications expecting standard POSIX to run. By the time I get the cash, Nothing will work right.

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

#303

Post by luckydude »

nullnix wrote: post #289
luckydude wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me a file that was slow and lets see how it is in BitKeeper. I bet you'll be impressed. 50K lines is not even 3x bigger than the file I mentioned. Which we check out in 20 milliseconds. As for optimizing blame, you are missing the point, it's not blame, it's merge, it's copy by reference rather than copy by value.

I'd do that if I was still working there. I can probably still get hold of a horror case but it'll take negotiation :) (And yes, optimizing merge matters too, indeed it was a huge part of git's raison d'etre -- but, again, one usually merges with the stuff at the tip of tree: merging against something you did five years ago is rare, even if it's at a branch tip, and even rarer otherwise. Having to rewrite all the unm…

Our busiest file is 400K checked out and about 1MB for the history file lz4 compressed. Uncompressed is 2.2M and the weave is 1.7M of that.

Doesn't seem bad to me. The weave is big for binaries, we imported 20 years of Solaris stuff once and the history was 1.1x the size of the checked out files.

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

#304

Post by dtamhk »

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…

>> Evan later wrote a paper basically saying that was an awful idea

Is this paper available online? Thanks.

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

#305

Post by luckydude »

dtamhk wrote: post #304
luckydude wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Evan later wrote a paper basically saying that was an awful idea Is this paper available online? Thanks.

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

And for the record, Evan was somewhat justified in not saying I had anything to do with Teamware since I made his team look like idiots, ran circles around them. On the other hand, taking smoosh.c and removing my name from the history was dishonest and a douche move. Especially since not one person on that team was capable of rewriting it.

The fact remains that Teamware is just a productized version of NSElite which was written entirely by me.

If I sound grumpy, I am. Politics shouldn't mess with history but they always do.

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

#306

Post by ryao »

luckydude wrote: post #279
ryao wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ZFS may have never seen the light of day if Solaris were open sourced in 1995. It depends on how that would have affected Jeff Bonwick. If it kept him from deciding that Sun ought to develop a new filesystem, promising Matthew Ahrens a job writing one out of college and working together with Matt on it, ZFS would never have existed.

Some history. I was at Sun and Bob Hagmann was teaching at Stanford and got me to be a TA there. He retired and Stanford asked me if I would teach CS240B so I did. Jeff Bonwick was student and I recognized his ability and recruited him to Sun. He said "I have no experience programming in C" and I said "You are smart. I can teach you C, I can't teach you smart". I also told him that he'd go way farther at Sun than I d…

In that case, you are one of the guys on whose shoulders much of what I have done stands. Thank you.

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

#307

Post by setpatchaddress »

burfog wrote: post #194
luckydude wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Seriously? Your life would be easier if you simply learned to use git properly.

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

#308

Post by burfog »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #307
burfog wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Seriously? Your life would be easier if you simply learned to use git properly.

Well, it's that bad. When I try to do things the "right" way I'm constantly exposed to the innards of git. I don't care about that stuff. It's complicated. It's a distraction from, you know, the actual task I was trying to do before git got involved.

I've done significant work with 5 other version control systems, including BitKeeper and ClearCase. Nothing is as difficult as git. At this point, I give up. Screw it.

I can do diff, tar, and patch. I have an editor. That'll do. I won't miss the confusing errors. Most importantly, I trust that these simple tools will not eat my work.

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

#309

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #270
SwellJoe wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struck by how much this sounds like a Linux fan ranting back in 1995, when Windows and "real" UNIX was king. The underdog rants were rampant back then (I'm sure I penned a few of them myself). I think the assumption you're making is that people choose Linux out of ignorance (and, I think the ignorance goes both ways; folks using Solaris have been so accustomed to Zones, ZFS, and dtrace being the unique characteri…

So, why isn't any major hosting provider offering a multi-tenant Linux container hosting service directly on bare-metal Linux servers, whereas Joyent is providing Docker-compatible container hosting on SmartOS using LX-branded zones? Does anyone trust the security of Linux namespaces and cgroups in a multi-tenant environment? That's the one thing that SmartOS really seems to have going for it.

I's not just a matter of trust: namespaces and cgroups break like graham crackers. But you knew that already. ;)
Post reply on HN