[nmglug] Bash Scripting Help -- Thanks!!!

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 09:48 -0600, Sam Noble wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 07:33 -0700, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> > other than use of a
> > version control system such as CVS, Subversion, or GNU Arch
> 
> Don't forget BitKeeper! It's technically superior!
> 
> http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966
> http://dot.kde.org/1112318366/
> http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/blog/1112773024
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html


The problem is that BitKeeper is not free.  From
http://planet.ubuntulinux.org/  (Today; it's a blog, so I quote in
entirity below)


\begin{quote}

BitKeeper

So the free (no-cost) version of BitKeeper has been discontinued,
leaving just the commercial version and the limited open source version
(which is essentially limited to checking out the head revision of a
particular tree).

It seems a bit weird that one of the stated reasons for discontinuing
the free version is a dispute with OSDL, where some employees were using
BitKeeper (eg. Linus), while another unrelated employee was reverse
engineering it as a personal project. This is a bit surprising, since it
seems that a scenario almost the same as this was brought up last year
and Larry said his concern was a licensed BitKeeper user helping someone
else reverse engineer the code. Of course, there are probably other
issues involved here.

This does bring up an interesting issue of what users of the free
version are going to do with their repositories. While they can use the
open source editing to easily check out the head revision and continue
development, it isn't clear that it can be used to extract all the
information stored in a repository. And since BitMover has refused to
sell the commercial version to some people, it is conceivable that some
projects could find themselves unable to access their revision history
with BitKeeper.

I doubt this situation is acceptable to many users (they are using a
version control system, so probably want to keep their revision
history), so there will probably be some programs written to extract all
the information from a BitKeeper repository. Ironically, this could add
some value to BitKeeper for BitMover's commercial customers -- insurance
for their data in case BitMover disappears or something else makes
BitKeeper unusable to them.

\end{quote}