[Gnu-arch-users] Re: bitkeeper vs tla

[Miles Bader]

Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> writes:
>       in bitkeeper, a tree is an archive is a tree;

Does this mean if you "get" (in tla-speak) a new project tree, the size
includes the entire project history (in SCCS-compatible form)?  That
seems, um.... rather to discourage making new project trees, which is a
shame -- one of the things I love about arch is that with a local
archive or a good revision library, you can easily "get" tons of scratch
trees to play around with (for doing particularly tricky merges or
something), even if the source tree is quite large.

Some other points I've heard about bitkeeper (never used it though [not
allowed too!]):

  * It apparently requires you to declare which files you change before
    you change them ("bk edit" command I think).  This would obviously
    allow bitkeeper to work very speedily because it can avoid diffing
    large trees, but could be pretty annoying for the user, especially
    one used to CVS or other "relaxed" systems.

  * I get the impression from lkml discussion that it has quite strict
    ancestry requirements for merging -- arch on the other hand allows
    some pretty wild & free merge styles, even on trees that have very
    dubious relationships.

-Miles
-- 
"Though they may have different meanings, the cries of 'Yeeeee-haw!' and
 'Allahu akbar!' are, in spirit, not actually all that different."