"In a recent email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml), Andrea Arcangeli announced that he had written a custom script to access the BitKeeper linux kernel source code repository, though still finding it difficult to piece together changesets in the proper order. Linus Torvalds replied offering several lengthy explanations of the necessary complexity involved in distributed development, illustrating why changesets can't simply be applied in numerical order, one after the other. He summarizes, 'So please realize that BK is different from (and strictly more powerful than) CVS. But this difference is the whole _point_ of it, and the reason for why I use it for the kernel, and refuse to use CVS.'
"Larry McVoy noted that Andrea's method of extracting changesets from the html output uses 1000 times the bandwidth as using the bitkeeper tool directly, explaining that if people start pounding his servers with this inefficient method he will have no choice but to disallow http access to the BitKeeper linux kernel archives. However, as a compromise Larry announced, 'We're going to make a CVS archive of Linus tree available, automatically updated, and we'll rsync it to some public place like kernel.org so you can get at the data in a way you want with no BK involved at all...'"
