[Savannah-hackers] Fighting BitKeeper: There is no such thing as a Free Lunch

[Shlomi Fish]

At the moment the situation in the free software world is that two
alternatives with public hosting exist:

1. CVS - old, reliable but a pain to work with. Fully Free.

2. BitKeeper - very good, and a joy to work with. Distributed under a very
restrictive license.

Subversion is an alternative that is somewhere in between. It is much
better than CVS, a joy to work with too, and aims to be as feature-rich as
BitKeeper one day. However, it has no public hosting and so has very few
users.

Now, open source developers cannot chose it because they cannot host their
projects at a centralized place. So, they must either use CVS or
BitKeeper. Some are not very idealistic and use BitKeeper because of its
superiority despite its restrictions. I know of someone who is much more
idealistic than I am who told me he will continue to use BitKeeper to keep
track of the Linux kernel development, because he does not see himself
contributing to Subversion, Arch, Aegis or its likes in the future. This
was very alarming to me.

Now, obviously the Subversion people wanted to rely on cutting-edge
technology so they used Berkeley DB 4.0, and Apache 2.0. This might be a
problem, but in order to make sure it can compete with BitKeeper we need
to overcome it. You need to make some effort in raising a Subversion
server, if you want people to ditch BitKeeper for good (and for the
Subversion development to accelerate - more users = more development[1])

If you OTOH reject Subversion because it is not straightforward to install
on your Debian Stable (%-)) systems, then it will take much longer time
for it to develop, and meanwhile innocent developers will be lured into
the BitKeeper and bkbits.net service (which are excellent except for the
bad licensing).

Note that Aegis and Arch do not give a sufficient answer to CVS, BitKeeper
or Subversion. Arch has a relatively hard process and is very slow. Aegis
is very professional, but it is more of an SCM than a revision control
system, and many people don't want to be bothered by its unique process.
(they just want to check in, check out, merge, branch, etc). Installing
them as well won't be a bad idea, but only Subversion would be suitable
for the masses.

I am willing to give any help I can in setting up Subversion, Apache 2.0
and the other stuff there. They can easily be installed on a separate
directory, and I believe can also run as a non-root user. They will occupy
a different port than usual:  8080 and 8081 for mod_ssl. Thus, they should
pose a minimal implication on the security of the server. Subversion can
be updated by checking out the latest version from its own repository
(bootstrapping a new version based on the already installed old one), and
Apache 2.0 has a CVS server that we can update from. I think DB 4.0 is
very stable.

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish


[1] - Refer to Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".



----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        address@hidden
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.