The BitKeeper to CVS gateway goes live [LWN.net]

Larry McVoy has announced the availability of the current BitKeeper kernel repository in CVS format. Things are still stabilizing, but the plan is to have the current 2.4 and 2.5 repositories available in CVS format in near real time. Almost all of the change and commit information will be available, making it easy for people who are unwilling or unable to run BitKeeper to peruse the kernel's revision history and track current developments. Says Larry:

Our goal is to provide the data in a way that you can get at it without being dependent on us or BK in any way. As soon as we have this debugged, I'd like to move the CVS repositories to kernel.org (if I can get HPA to agree) and then you'll have the revision history and can live without the fear of the "don't piss Larry off license". Quite frankly, we don't like the current situation any better than many of you, so if this addresses your concerns that will take some pressure off of us.

Of course, when dealing with this sort of topic, things are never that easy. People will certainly be happy to have the CVS repository available, but one other aspect of the announcement has made people nervous. It seems that the near-SCCS file format used by BitKeeper is increasingly difficult to work with; now that BitKeeper repositories can be accessed in CVS format, the BitKeeper developers would like to move to a new, proprietary format. And that idea does not fly with all developers; this complaint from Ben Collins has been echoed by a few hackers:

You've made quite a marketing move. It's obvious to me, maybe not to others. By providing this CVS gateway, you make it almost pointless to work on an alternative client. Also by providing it, you make it easier to get away with locking the revision history into a proprietary format.

It is clear that, as long as BitKeeper is in use by the kernel development community, some people are going to be unhappy. Nothing short of the complete freeing of the BitKeeper source will satisfy some users, and that does not appear to be in the cards. Fortunately this disagreement, while noisy, hasn't really gotten in the way of continued kernel development.

In fact, it hasn't even gotten in the way of BitKeeper as it improves the kernel development process. Regardless of what one thinks of BitKeeper or its license, the fact remains that kernel development has been working well over the last year; an incredible stream of patches has been merged, and the people involved have stayed sane. As sane as they were before, anyway.

(As an aside, Larry has suggested that the license clause that forbids (free) BitKeeper use by people working on other source management systems could be removed in the future "if we feel we have pulled far enough ahead that everyone else is just playing catchup").

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It could also get worse.

Posted Apr 7, 2003 1:26 UTC (Mon) by jae (guest, #2369) [Link]

Larry has suggested that the license clause that forbids (free) BitKeeper use by people working on other source management systems could be removed in the future "if we feel we have pulled far enough ahead that everyone else is just playing catchup"

Which can also imply that it could get worse if Subversion (currently the strongest contender, I'd say), or anything else in the field, gets strong enough to really start eating into their market.