Interview with Brian Aker (LinuxWorld) [LWN.net]

LinuxWorld interviews MySQL architect Brian Aker on a wide range of issues, from storage engines to open source economics. "In our view today, BitKeeper is still the strongest player and much stronger than actually three contenders right now which are Bazaar-NG, Mercurial and Git. And Git's only recent. And they're not quite there just yet. And it's interesting to see who can outinnovate who first. Can Larry and BitKeeper out keep outinnovating the open source guys, or will the open source guys pass him up. And it's interesting to watch. But I think it's making all the different products in that market better in the end, because they all have to compete with one another."

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Interview with Brian Aker (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 13, 2007 23:37 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

"And Git's only recent"

This is quite an awkward statement; why single out Git? All of the mentioned RCSes got started roughly at the same time.

According to Wikipedia, the exact announcement dates are: Bazaar-NG 2005-02-01, Git 2005-04-07, and Mercurial 2005-04-19.

Interview with Brian Aker (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 0:48 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

While that's true, note that Bazaar-NG is a fork of/enhancement to arch, which was around for a long time before Git.

Also, I'm surprised he doesn't mention Monotone, which was around for a while before Git, is distributed, and was the SCM tool Linus most seriously considered before deciding to write Git. Maybe he meant to say Monotone when he said Mercurial.

And of course there's Darcs which is also distributed, and was also around for a while before Git.

Interview with Brian Aker (LinuxWorld)

Posted Jun 14, 2007 1:27 UTC (Thu) by danielthaler (subscriber, #24764) [Link]

I can't say much about the others, but I've used Darcs quite a bit; I found that it got painful quickly whenever I tried to do anything other than add patches linearly.

The usual story for just about anything else was that it ran for hours and/or got oom-killed...

A year has passed since then, though, so who knows - maybe it got better?