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Mudama"</a></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/7/27">Jan Hudec</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/26">Matthias Urlichs</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/316">Marcin Dalecki</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/9/31">Jan Hudec</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/10/206">Miles Bader</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/10/212">Marcin Dalecki</a></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/7/86">Andrew Walrond</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/7/304">Ian Wienand</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/4">Chris Wedgwood</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/9">Linus Torvalds</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/14">Chris Wedgwood</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/18">(H. Peter Anvin)</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/43"> ross@lug ...</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/172">Linus Torvalds</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/46">Andrea Arcangeli</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/113">Matthias Andree</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/155">Linus Torvalds</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/48">Marcel Lanz</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/82">Geert Uytterhoeven</a></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/76">Matt Johnston</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/12/54">Kedar Sovani</a><ul><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/12/83">Catalin Marinas</a></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/13/4">Ricky Beam</a></li></ul></li></ul></li><li><a href="/lkml/2005/4/8/107">Catalin Marinas</a></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul></td><td width="32" rowspan="2" class="c" valign="top"><img src="/images/icornerl.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="/" /></td><td class="c" rowspan="2" valign="top" style="padding-top: 1em"><table><tr><td><table><tr><td class="lp">Date</td><td class="rp" itemprop="datePublished">Wed, 6 Apr 2005 08:42:08 -0700 (PDT)</td></tr><tr><td class="lp">From</td><td class="rp" itemprop="author">Linus Torvalds <></td></tr><tr><td class="lp">Subject</td><td class="rp" itemprop="name">Kernel SCM saga..</td></tr></table></td><td></td></tr></table><pre itemprop="articleBody"><br />Ok,<br /> as a number of people are already aware (and in some cases have been<br />aware over the last several weeks), we've been trying to work out a<br />conflict over BK usage over the last month or two (and it feels like<br />longer ;). That hasn't been working out, and as a result, the kernel team<br />is looking at alternatives.<br /><br />[ And apparently this just hit slashdot too, so by now _everybody_ knows ]<br /><br />It's not like my choice of BK has been entirely conflict-free ("No,<br />really? Do tell! Oh, you mean the gigabytes upon gigabytes of flames we<br />had?"), so in some sense this was inevitable, but I sure had hoped that it<br />would have happened only once there was a reasonable open-source<br />alternative. As it is, we'll have to scramble for a while.<br /><br />Btw, don't blame BitMover, even if that's probably going to be a very<br />common reaction. Larry in particular really did try to make things work<br />out, but it got to the point where I decided that I don't want to be in<br />the position of trying to hold two pieces together that would need as much<br />glue as it seemed to require.<br /><br />We've been using BK for three years, and in fact, the biggest problem<br />right now is that a number of people have gotten very very picky about<br />their tools after having used the best. Me included, but in fact the<br />people that got helped most by BitKeeper usage were often the people<br />_around_ me who had a much easier time merging with my tree and sending<br />their trees to me.<br /><br />Of course, there's also probably a ton of people who just used BK as a<br />nicer (and much faster) "anonymous CVS" client. We'll get that sorted out,<br />but the immediate problem is that I'm spending most my time trying to see<br />what the best way to co-operate is.<br /><br />NOTE! BitKeeper isn't going away per se. Right now, the only real thing<br />that has happened is that I've decided to not use BK mainly because I need<br />to figure out the alternatives, and rather than continuing "things as<br />normal", I decided to bite the bullet and just see what life without BK<br />looks like. So far it's a gray and bleak world ;)<br /><br />So don't take this to mean anything more than it is. I'm going to be<br />effectively off-line for a week (think of it as a normal "Linus went on a<br />vacation" event) and I'm just asking that people who continue to maintain<br />BK trees at least try to also make sure that they can send me the result<br />as (individual) patches, since I'll eventually have to merge some other<br />way.<br /><br />That "individual patches" is one of the keywords, btw. One thing that BK <br />has been extremely good at, and that a lot of people have come to like <br />even when they didn't use BK, is how we've been maintaining a much finer- <br />granularity view of changes. That isn't going to go away. <br /><br />In fact, one impact BK ha shad is to very fundamentally make us (and me in<br />particular) change how we do things. That ranges from the fine-grained<br />changeset tracking to just how I ended up trusting submaintainers with<br />much bigger things, and not having to work on a patch-by-patch basis any<br />more. So the three years with BK are definitely not wasted: I'm convinced <br />it caused us to do things in better ways, and one of the things I'm <br />looking at is to make sure that those things continue to work.<br /><br />So I just wanted to say that I'm personally very happy with BK, and with <br />Larry. It didn't work out, but it sure as hell made a big difference to <br />kernel development. And we'll work out the temporary problem of having to <br />figure out a set of tools to allow us to continue to do the things that BK <br />allowed us to do.<br /><br />Let the flames begin.<br /><br /> Linus<br /><br />PS. Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading<br />up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't<br />pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are<br />already aware of my problems ;)<br />-<br />To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in<br />the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org<br />More majordomo info at <a href="http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html">http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html</a><br />Please read the FAQ at <a href="http://www.tux.org/lkml/">http://www.tux.org/lkml/</a><br /><br /></pre></td><td width="32" rowspan="2" class="c" valign="top"><img src="/images/icornerr.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="\" /></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="bottom"> 聽 </td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="bottom">聽</td><td class="c" valign="bottom" style="padding-bottom: 0px"><img src="/images/bcornerl.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="\" /></td><td class="c">聽</td><td class="c" valign="bottom" style="padding-bottom: 0px"><img src="/images/bcornerr.gif" width="32" height="32" alt="/" /></td></tr><tr><td align="right" valign="top" colspan="2"> 聽 </td><td class="lm">Last update: 2009-11-18 23:46 聽聽 [from the cache]<br />漏2003-2020 <a href="http://blog.jasper.es/"><span itemprop="editor">Jasper Spaans</span></a>|hosted at <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=9a8e99d24cf9">Digital Ocean</a> and my Meterkast|<a href="http://blog.jasper.es/categories.html#lkml-ref">Read the blog</a></td><td>聽</td></tr></table><script language="javascript" src="/js/styleswitcher.js" type="text/javascript"></script></body></html>