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Tridge Releases BitKeeper-Compatible Tool 189

Posted by Zonk from the taking-it-to-the-next-level dept.
Peter Willis writes "Looking at Freshmeat today (a part of OSTG) it seems Andrew Tridgell has released the BitKeeper-compatible source code management client mentioned on slashdot recently, called SourcePuller. As part of the downloads available for the project you can also get dump files which detail how to pull data from BK trees without the use of libsp. From the README: 'SourcePuller is not intended to be a full replacement for BitKeeper. Instead, you should use SourcePuller as an interoperability tool for situations where you cannot use bk itself. SourcePuller is missing a large amount of core functionality from BitKeeper, and thus is not suitable as a full replacement.'" Article available about the release on The Register.
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Tridge Releases BitKeeper-Compatible Tool More

Tridge Releases BitKeeper-Compatible Tool

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  • As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:51AM (#12313245)
    Finally, I would like to point out the obvious fact that Linus was perfectly within his rights to choose bk for the kernel. I personally would not have chosen it, but it was his choice to make, not anyone elses. Linus is now in the unenviable position of changing source code management systems, which is a painful task, particularly when moving away from a system that worked as well as bk did.
    If you want to help, then help with code not commentary. There have been enough flames over this issue already.
    so let's keep it civil, eh?
    • so let's keep it civil, eh?

      Oh! Civility. I'm afraid we don't have much call for that around these parts. May I interest you in some irony?

      KFG

    • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Insightful)

      by qortra ( 591818 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:00AM (#12313346)
      Nice quote, but the thing is, that's all we CAN do here. Slashdot is not a place to do software development; it isn't set up for that. It's a place for discussion. So basically, discuss, praise the author, try & review the software, but if you want to "help with code", you're in the wrong place.

      • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You can however refrain from posting and contact someone about helping with the code. It's really not a thing I have time for or even interests me, so I doubt I'll be much help. I'm mostly a measly web/database programmer anyway. :)

        -- gid
      • Nice quote, but the thing is, that's all we CAN do here. Slashdot is not a place to do software development; it isn't set up for that. It's a place for discussion. So basically, discuss, praise the author, try & review the software, but if you want to "help with code", you're in the wrong place.

        Hardly.
        1) telnet thunk.org 5000
        2) help
        3) ????
        4) quit

        Ok, normally 4 should be Profit, but this actually works....

    • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Funny)

      by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:02AM (#12313363) Journal
      You heard it hear first, Tridge is anti-comments. If you want GCC to continue to support comments, speak up now or forever hold your peace.

      • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Funny)

        by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 ( 812236 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:05AM (#12313404) Journal
        From the source code I've seen and debugged, it seems most programmers are anti-comments.

        • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Funny)

          by indifferent children ( 842621 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:39AM (#12314348)
          it seems most programmers are anti-comments

          You're kidding right? What do you call all of that whitespace that we sprinkle around our code? Those are comments.

          If a block of code is especially self-contained or tricky, then it is surrounded by two carriage-returns before the block and two carriage-returns after the block.

          If some statements are part of a loop, then we gratuitously indent them. That's not for the compiler's benefit; those are comments.

          Don't even get me started on our extreme generosity in supplying names (not just types!) in our function and method prototypes. What, you want us to draw you a map?



          BTW, I would submit more Insightful comments in my code if only my peers with good karma had Mod Points at code review time.

          • At least you don't get your code-reviewers moderating your code as -1,Redundant and -1,Offtopic. That's almost mean-spirited enough to make me stop submitting "Hello, World" patches.

            But I shall persevere. And perhaps, I'll add some CRLFs this time.
          • Heh. This reminds me of some of the original UNIX code, from the V6/V7 days.

            The startup code was all done in DEC assembly (of course), in a file called locore.s (or something like that - it's been years since I've seen it). Either Brian Kernigham or Dennis Ritchie must have written it; I think it was the former.

            Utterly obtuse assembly code, unless perhaps you've spent a good deal of time programming in DEC assembly. Then, no doubt, it was quite clear.

            Anyway, about halfway down (after about 50 lines or so

          • BTW, I would submit more Insightful comments in my code if only my peers with good karma had Mod Points at code review time.

            Yeah, I would submit more comments in my code, too, but I would be aiming for +5 Funny so it probably wouldn't help anybody understand the code anyway.

          • If some statements are part of a loop, then we gratuitously indent them.

            Really? I always thought that was the ghost of RMS reaching out of emacs to strangle me...
          • Wow.... I have to say... I wish all programmers commented the way you do.

            What I personally hate is the way many programmers often try to tell me how their code works using comments. These are dangerous. Whitespace provides hints as to how to read how it works, but the code has to be your authoritative point for that: SPOT principle at work (comments should not get outdated).

            If the code does not speak for itself, it is bad code and should be rewritten.

            Now........ When you do comment... Don't tell me
            • If the code does not speak for itself, it is bad code and should be rewritten.

              Is that truly universal? What if a really ugly regex is the most efficient way to get something done? What if the code in question implements a not immediately apparant algorithm? As far as algorithms go some rely on some rather hairy math that not everybody has minored in mathematics to understand. In situations like that, the last thing we need are arrogant programmers who think their code is so elegant as to not need comm
              • Is that truly universal? What if a really ugly regex is the most efficient way to get something done? What if the code in question implements a not immediately apparant algorithm?

                What if your really ugly regex is broken? Should I be debugging your comments or your regex?

                In this case, I would like a comment which says something about why you chose that way. Something like:

                "This is ugly but seems better than the alternative."

                This is an immediate flag that this piece of code is difficult to read and de
              • I think he means stuff like:

                if(a!=1){ /* if a isn't equal to one */
                a++; /* increment a */
                x+=a-1; /* add the old value of a onto x */
                foo( x); /* foo is a function, call it passing the value of x */
                } /* end of if (a!= 1) block */

                I have seen code like that from inexperienced coders because their tutor's slides explained what each line does in a comment and they thought that's what you're supposed to do. They also thought that indentation and whitespace was done in the slides because the tutor fan
                • Exactly. I wasn't advocating that sort of thing at all. I'm thinking more along the lines of tersely documented document headers and some explanation when the developer feels excessive cleverness is called for. Comments don't have to be and shouldn't be a stream of consciousness.

                  Another situation where they're called for is if working around brokeness elsewhere is necessary. Without knowing the problem being worked around, it won't be clear why apparantly baroque code was used. I just don't accept the
        • And when they do have comments, the comments are wrong because someone redesigned that bit of code 10 versions back and never bothered to update the comments.
        • From "Real Programmers Don't Eat Quiche":

          Real Programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand and even harder to modify.

      • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Funny)

        by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:12AM (#12313472) Journal
        "heard it hear first"

        Jesus God, that's one of the dumbest fuckups I've seen in a /. comment, and it's in my comment.

    • Re:As Tridge says in the README (Score:5, Informative)

      by snorklewacker ( 836663 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:42AM (#12313752)
      > If you want to help, then help with code not commentary

      Fact is, this is slashdot. It's the nee plus ultra of peanut galleries. Note well that Linus doesn't read or post to slashdot -- he's been busy working on git, which is not a great SCM itself, but it's turning out to be pretty hot as a library. Arch is adopting git as a backend, and darcs is talking about using libgit (once there is a libgit) for a performance boost.
      • Arch is adopting git as a backend...

        Really? I have to say I find that quite amazing. How long has arch been around? And git is, what, 3 or so weeks old? Either Linus really is as shit hot a coder as many would have us believe, or the arch guys have been doing something terribly wrong. Is git so fundamentally different from every other SCM out there that no one but Linus saw the need for it? Open source really does move breathtakingly fast sometimes...

  • Might come in handy now (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:53AM (#12313271)
    with the move away from bitkeeper. :-D

    On a serious note, it's good that this apparently oh so evil piece of software is finally out in the open, so that the people can see that all the fuss was about a tool that allows you to get your data that is managed by a propietary tool. How evil...

    • Re:Might come in handy now (Score:5, Informative)

      by LiENUS ( 207736 ) <slashdot AT vetmanage DOT com> on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:23AM (#12313567) Homepage
      Just a note, this tool assists in no way with the move away from bitkeeper, it was only of benefit when the linux kernel was still in bitkeeper. All this lets you do is pull source from a bitkeeper server, it does not replace the bitkeeper server. The way this benefits the open source community is now developers can begin intregrating this library into other development systems (like IDEs) and allowing bitkeeper integration.
      • Well, being open source it won't be hard to fork and then start working on creating the server and "core functionality".
      • Just a note, this tool assists in no way with the move away from bitkeeper, it was only of benefit when the linux kernel was still in bitkeeper. All this lets you do is pull source from a bitkeeper server, it does not replace the bitkeeper server. The way this benefits the open source community is now developers can begin intregrating this library into other development systems (like IDEs) and allowing bitkeeper integration.

        Your "just a note" makes little sense. The purpose of SourcePuller is to retrieve
        • The version history was never "lost".

          What do you think Linus is using to test GIT ?

          Notice how he didn't announce he got the data with Tridge's help - why ? - because it wasn't necessary, everything could be exported anyhow. But apparently that wasn't enough for Tridge.

    • Re:Might come in handy now (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:26AM (#12314212) Homepage Journal

      On a serious note, it's good that this apparently oh so evil piece of software is finally out in the open, so that the people can see that all the fuss was about a tool that allows you to get your data that is managed by a propietary tool.

      In a way it's good to have issues like this bubble up to give people a chance to really think about the fundamental principles involved in open source development.

      For instance, it would be hypocritical to applaud Tridge for his work on reverse-engineering SMB to create Samba and to simultaneously criticize him for doing the exact same thing with BK.

      Likewise, to criticize MS for using secrecy to make money with its products, while decrying the effect Tridge's reverse engineering has on the income of the Larry trying to feed his family by selling BK.

      The principles have to hold independent of the emotional circumstances and the players of the game.

      FOSS is all about the natural migration of more and more software technology into commodities. And that will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow for anyone who has created new software that makes money for them. At some point, if the software is really useful, other competent programmers will look to produce a work-alike functionality. And it will be for the greater good of humanity as a whole because they will be able to use better tools for less money. Even as it erodes the financial benefits that accrue to one or to a few from having thought and done it first.

      A happy ending would be Tridge's sofware encouraging more people to buy the BK core to interoperate with Sourcepuller. But, in the longer run, I expect a free core will eventually be developed and it will displace the proprietary one.

      • But, in the longer run, I expect a free core will eventually be developed and it will displace the proprietary one.

        And that my friends, is true innovation! Let someone else come up with a good idea and then implement a feature identical replacement.

        Actually one of the nice things to come out of this is the work Linus has done on git. At least someone is trying to come up with something new.

        • And that my friends, is true innovation! Let someone else come up with a good idea and then implement a feature identical replacement.

          That is the history of all technology starting from Ogg The Caveman bashing his kill with a stick and Argh seeing it and trying it with a rock.

          Bitkeeper itself copies functionality and ideas from older SCMs; it didn't arise in a vacuum. And we all know the one about how Xerox invented the point and click GUI except that they really didn't either.
      • Unlike Samba, SourcePuller is completely useless without the proprietary product. So, you need to violate a commercial license in order to use it at all.

        Samba provides both client and server capability (and PDC and AD functionality now too) for non-Windows OS's.

        There really is no BK core and BK client like there is in the CIFS world. In order to replace the "BK core" someone will have to write from the ground-up a complete distributed SCM system. If that effort is undertaken then I really see no benefi

        • Ah, the first idiot posts...

          First of all, as I understand it, the commercial license involved says you will not reverse engineer the product YOU licensed. SourcePuller doesn't do that if YOU use it with some other SCM - it simply interoperates. It may do that if Tridge wrote it that way, which he didn't since he wasn't a licensee in the first place.

          Secondly, using SourcePuller does not "get you aside from losing a tool". That statement is just idiotic. SourcePuller gets you exactly what Tridge says - i
          • Not really though.

            Referencing Samba's AD support is actually a big point. The point is that Samba can replace an AD system, just like you could use a box running Samba to be a PDC before.

            SourcePuller can do no such thing. SourcePuller's one and only function is to pull stuff out of BitKeeper. There's no interoperability. What SCM software can SourcePuller put that data into? I know, let's write a CVS plug-in for it. Oh wait, BitMover already provided that!
      • "The principles have to hold independent of the emotional circumstances and the players of the game." Spoke the high morale philosofer. Back in the real world, we behave, and make laws accordingly, that are big fat principle breakers, for perfectly valid practical reasons. We can fly a flag. We cannot fly the Nazi flag. Beng. Principle violation. We can speak. We cannot speak hate propaganda. Beng. Murder bad, war good. Beng beng. The principles dont differ, the practical consequenses differ. From some f
    • Might come in handy now with the move away from bitkeeper.
      Wow, that was a close call. I mean, we almost had a situation where, like, anyone off the street could have just used this piece of software to download the entire source code to the Linux kernel. And -- OMG -- this wouldn't have been just the stuff that the kernel developers had decided was OK to release to the public, but the real complete version that they were working on, with all the metadata included. 'Cause, y'know, once all that highly sen

  • Like Grains of Sand in an Hourglass... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jeff_schiller ( 877821 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:53AM (#12313273) Homepage
    ...so goes the soap opera that has become the Linux community

  • Logo? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:02AM (#12313366)
    A big huge middle finger!

  • Wow, that's a lot of code for telnet poking around (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chyeburashka ( 122715 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:13AM (#12313477) Homepage
    zoopark:~/sp-0.1 gena$ cat `find . -name "*.c"` | wc -l
    13416
    zoopark:~/sp-0.1 gena$ cat `find . -name "*.h"` | wc -l
    859
    zoopark:~/sp-0.1 gena$ cat `find . -name "*.[ch]"` | wc -l
    14275

  • WTG (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Tharkban ( 877186 )
    Congratulations to Tridge.

    Sounds like everyone was within their rights. Which means disagreement is simply the by product of everyone being human.

  • Why the P.C name? (Score:5, Funny)

    by thehunger ( 549253 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:32AM (#12313646)
    A tool that lets you Pull stuff out of BitKeeper. How did he manage to avoid naming it BitPull?

  • This is what Larry was complaining about? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:03AM (#12313994)
    If *this* is the project Larry was complaining about so much, I can't wait to hear what he has to say now.

    Larry, is THIS the reverse engineering you were talking about? Stealing your ideas? Making OSS version of BitKeeper? Blah, blah.

    There were so many cases of people making opensource software talking to proprietary back-end (getting stock quotes with tool via TCP, for example, instead of using Java/Windows clients), and noone really made so much noise.

    I have no respect anymore for BitKeeper and Larry if this is all Tridge was "reverse engineering".

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:43AM (#12314389)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Which was only released a month ago... something tells me they released that in response to Tridge's work which demonstrated the demand for such a tool to them.

    • Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) * on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:18PM (#12314734) Homepage Journal
      Look at the date: 2005/03/17 (or March 17th 2005 for the rest of you). Obviously it was released to undercut Tridge.

      Tridge had 2 options after that:
      a) release his version (which is also just a client) and get the "is this it? But why did Tridge do that?" comments like the parent; or
      b) not release it, and let the rumors fly around.

      I'm glad Tridge chose to release his version and now we can all move on. Of course, the real loser in this is McVoy (he lost his biggest mouthpiece), followed by Linus (who has to now duplicate the functionality of BK as much as he can, and while he's mucking with the tools the kernel development takes a backseat).

      • I don't recall the exact timeline, but the original article mentioned that the Bk folk and Linus tried to come to some sort of terms that would satisfy Tridge. Given that this tool was made available a month ago, I suspect that it wasn't created to "undercut Tridge" but rather in an attempt to placate him. Apparently that attempt wasn't successful.

    • Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bananenrepublik ( 49759 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:43PM (#12314966)
      Tridge's tool is about extracting the complete history out of a bitkeeper server, bitkeeper's open client is about providing an equivalent to cvs up. Fairly obvious if you RTFA and TFPYLT (the f*cking page you're linking to).

  • Shoulda named it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cyn ( 50070 ) <{cyn} {at} {cyn.org}> on Friday April 22, 2005 @12:08PM (#12314659) Homepage
    BitTaker

    Or, for a more exacting description of what their relationship is... rename both tools:

    BitKeeper -> BitPitcher
    SourcePuller -> BitCatcher
  • Stared too long into the abyss, gave way to despair, betrayed his realm.

    Lunckily Gandalf/Stallman is going to install a new king for us...

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