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Posted Jan 26, 2006 21:04 UTC (Thu) by Peter (guest, #1127)
In reply to: git by avr
Parent article: Tridge wins the 2005 Free Software Award

It was people that lightened Linus' workload and bitkeeper was the tool that may have helped to restructure the workflow. As I see it BK was far from the is-all-end-all solution to Linus' impending burnout and claiming it was, just because it happened to be there at the time, is a very lopsided view.

No, he's right. Bitkeeper didn't "happen to be there at the time", that is the lopsided view. It was the enabler for Linus's new workflow. There are things you can villify Larry for, I know it's a popular pasttime, but you crossed the line into rewriting history.

Linus was a very picky customer, he hated CVS and similar systems, and Larry basically built BK around the Linus use cases. It has since matured and diversified, but originally it was to be that tool intended to allow Linus to use version control without hating it.

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git

Posted Jan 26, 2006 23:01 UTC (Thu) by avr (guest, #27673) [Link]

>It was the enabler for Linus's new workflow.
An enabler is far from a complete solution.
Who knows what might have happened had the mm tree risen as the focal point of patches without bitkeeper?

>but you crossed the line into rewriting history.
A lot of credit for fixing Linus' workflow problem was lying around unclaimed, either because of modesty or because of disinterest, and bitkeeper scooped that all up and claimed it as its own.
Less pronounced dynamics in the background beside the adoption of bitkeeper were also important, just not as easily pinpointed.

I think it's not "rewriting history" but a parallax view on the whole affair. Sure bitkeeper had a role in it, but in my opinion bitkeeper is not the single silver bullet that saved kernel-development that it is made out to be.