move to bitkeeper?

[ron minnich]

sourceforge is really having trouble nowadays. Half my browsers think the 
web pages are to be downloaded for some reason; cvs updates are seeing 
24-hour delays; and random outages are a daily occurence.

I've noticed that lots of high-profile projects are now mastering on 
bitkeeper.com, including the linux kernel and the infiniband project.

Any comments or objections to me at least looking into a move to 
bitkeeper.com? It has lots of advantages, not the least that it supports 
distributed repositories.

Anyone have anything to say about this, pro or con?

ron

[Gregg C Levine]

Hello from Gregg C Levine
Good question. However, I haven't had any problems visiting the
project pages for the project. I agree, that the CVS stores indicate
that there's an unnecessary delay of about a day, but that's only on
the view function for CVS. They say that the problems are being
corrected. That they are busy pruning a lot of the dead projects, and
otherwise cleaning things up.

Now the other question. Ron, which browsers are telling you this? I
can view all of the project pages without difficulty, on MSIE, and the
version of Netscape delivered on Slackware 8.0, also with the browsers
that came with Gnome.
-------------------
Gregg C Levine [e-mail]
------------------------------------------------------------
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(This company dedicates this E-Mail to Master Yoda )
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:linuxbios-
> [e-mail]] On Behalf Of ron minnich
> Sent: Monday, June 30, 2003 11:22 AM
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: move to bitkeeper?
>
> sourceforge is really having trouble nowadays. Half my browsers

think the
> web pages are to be downloaded for some reason; cvs updates are

seeing
> 24-hour delays; and random outages are a daily occurence.
>
> I've noticed that lots of high-profile projects are now mastering on
> bitkeeper.com, including the linux kernel and the infiniband

project.
> Any comments or objections to me at least looking into a move to
> bitkeeper.com? It has lots of advantages, not the least that it

supports
> distributed repositories.
>
> Anyone have anything to say about this, pro or con?
>
> ron
>
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 08:22, ron minnich wrote:
> Any comments or objections to me at least looking into a move to 
> bitkeeper.com? It has lots of advantages, not the least that it supports 
> distributed repositories.

Things with Sourceforge are obviously only going to get worse, as VA is
in terrible shape financially.

Independent of that, BK is so much better at branching and merging than
any other SCM tool, it isn't even funny.  Couple that with the fact that
it's distributed, and that bkbits.net works pretty well, and I'd say
you're much better off than with CVS.

(No, I'm not a BitMover employee, but I do pay them money.)

<b

[Peter Busser]

Hello!
> Anyone have anything to say about this, pro or con?

The most heard objection against bitkeeper is that it is not free software.

Aegis (aegis.sourceforge.net) is free software.

Groetjes,
Peter Busser

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Peter Busser wrote:
> The most heard objection against bitkeeper is that it is not free software.

yeah, but that's actually ok by me. It's good software, and Larry's source 
policy is actually very reasonable.

Plus he has a viable business, which means that they will probably be 
there in a few years.

ron

[Clark Rawlins]

The real problem with Larry's policy is that if you work on 
any other SCM code free or not you must buy the full version
of the tools.  That would lock out some of us who have worked
on subversion/cvs/etc who want to work on LinuxBIOS.

Before making the jump to bitkeeper a real consideration of the
alternitives should be considered.

One that hasn't come up yet is subversion and/or tigris.org.

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 12:53:58PM -0600, ron minnich wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Peter Busser wrote:
> > The most heard objection against bitkeeper is that it is not free software.
>
> yeah, but that's actually ok by me. It's good software, and Larry's source 
> policy is actually very reasonable.
>
> Plus he has a viable business, which means that they will probably be 
> there in a few years.
>
> ron
>
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[ron minnich]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Clark Rawlins wrote:
> The real problem with Larry's policy is that if you work on 
> any other SCM code free or not you must buy the full version
> of the tools.  That would lock out some of us who have worked
> on subversion/cvs/etc who want to work on LinuxBIOS.

that locks out the project, but not the person, right?

ron

[Clark Rawlins]

It prevents the person from using the prefered tools of the project
to contribute to the project.  So when someone wants to get the 
latest sources and there is no daily snapshot tarball the user 
either has to fork over $4K (I think it costs that much I haven't
checked recently) or violate the licence or forgo working 
on the project until either a snapshot is available.

Clark

On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 01:23:23PM -0600, ron minnich wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Clark Rawlins wrote:
> > The real problem with Larry's policy is that if you work on 
> > any other SCM code free or not you must buy the full version
> > of the tools.  That would lock out some of us who have worked
> > on subversion/cvs/etc who want to work on LinuxBIOS.
>
> that locks out the project, but not the person, right?
>
> ron

ron minnich  writes:
> sourceforge is really having trouble nowadays. Half my browsers think the 
> web pages are to be downloaded for some reason; cvs updates are seeing 
> 24-hour delays; and random outages are a daily occurence.

Agreed.  So something needs to be done.
> I've noticed that lots of high-profile projects are now mastering on 
> bitkeeper.com, including the linux kernel and the infiniband project.
>
> Any comments or objections to me at least looking into a move to 
> bitkeeper.com? It has lots of advantages, not the least that it supports 
> distributed repositories.
>
> Anyone have anything to say about this, pro or con?

A significant con is that with the zero dollar license a developer
cannot work on source code control projects.  Which is a stiff
imposition.  The kernel avoids problems of this nature by with
regular releases and a patch submission process that does not
require you to use bk.  We don't have the infrastructure in place
to do that.

Subversion has the problem that it is not a distributed version
control system.  CVS isn't either but it is well understood.

With LANL potentially being behind a government firewall Ron I don't
think it makes sense for you to host a CVS sever correct?

We probably want to accumulate a list of other sites like sourceforge.
One is http://berlios.de

Eric

[Ian Castle]

You seem to be conflating two separate issues:

1) Source Forge is failing
2) CVS needs to be replaced

1. This may or may not be true - it seems to be working OK at the moment
for me (I commit to other projects than Linuxbios - which are probably
less active). But I would agree that SF is probably something that VA
can't afford to continue to run...

Alternatives: Use another hosting site (savannah? find a sponsor - IBM?,
OSDL? lnxi?, SiS? LANL pay for an offsite server away from the
firewall?)

2. BitKeeper seems to have advantages for _vast_ fluid projects like the
Linux kernel - where it is important to deal with a "patch" (something
that affects a lot of different sources) as a single unit - Most kernels
are made up of different patches choosen to meet the particular needs of
the hardware etc). The linux kernel also has a lot of people submitting
patches.

I'm not convinced that LinuxBIOS has outgrown the capabilities of CVS -
but I'm not necessarily best placed to judge that - not being a
committer.

The big attraction of Open Source/Free Software is, for me, having the
ability to fix things myself if I want to. I use many different projects
and have submitted changes to a variety of different projects over the
years. Many of which I could not have predicted submitting patches to. I
am deeply suspicious of a licence that forbids me from using my own
resources to supply fixes to other quite separate projects. It is
galling that the "first party" attempts to control relationships between
the "second" and "third" parties.

Anyway, you seem to be saying that there is a problem with sourceforge
so LinuxBios should not use CVS. I'm not sure about this argument.

If CVS is deemed unsatisfactory, I'm not sure that BitKeeper is the most
appropriate solution to the problem.

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 16:22, ron minnich wrote:
> sourceforge is really having trouble nowadays. Half my browsers think the 
> web pages are to be downloaded for some reason; cvs updates are seeing 
> 24-hour delays; and random outages are a daily occurence.
>
> I've noticed that lots of high-profile projects are now mastering on 
> bitkeeper.com, including the linux kernel and the infiniband project.
>
> Any comments or objections to me at least looking into a move to 
> bitkeeper.com? It has lots of advantages, not the least that it supports 
> distributed repositories.
>
> Anyone have anything to say about this, pro or con?
>
> ron
>
> Linuxbios mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

[Stefan Reinauer]

* ron minnich  [030630 17:22]:
> sourceforge is really having trouble nowadays. Half my browsers think the 
> web pages are to be downloaded for some reason; cvs updates are seeing 
> 24-hour delays; and random outages are a daily occurence.

Worst I saw was about a week of delay on the freebios2 tree.
> Any comments or objections to me at least looking into a move to 
> bitkeeper.com? It has lots of advantages, not the least that it supports 
> distributed repositories.
>
> Anyone have anything to say about this, pro or con?

There are quite some versioning systems that could be used instead of
CVS. I've been testing tla (Tom Lords Arch) for the openbios core i am
developing. It's relatively new, but promising (knows transactions,
renaming and deletion of files and directories etc)
Aegis otoh sets up on cvs (iirc) and gives additional checkin security
(4 eyes principle for checkins to the stable tree, automatic testsuites
and others)
subversion (svn) is probably the closest to cvs when it comes down to
usage (most cvs commands are available in svn, so developers don't have
to recalibrate on the new system).

Another thing is moving the source tree away from Sourceforge. In that
regard it'd be possible that we move the tree to the openbios cvs server
as well. It was very reliable up to now and the people administrating it 
are willing to help open source firmware projects. Moving to a
versioning system other than CVS should not be a problem.

Stefan