KernelTrap: BitBucket, A GPL’ed BitKeeper Exporter

“Pavel Machek recently announced a new project on the lkml
called BitBucket. This project aims to provide read only access (at
least for now) to a BitKeeper repository. I asked Pavel why he
started this project, to which he explained, ‘There were way too
many flamewars on l-k already, so I felt it was time to do some
coding.’ As is usual when BitKeeper is discussed on the lkml, a
lengthy debate followed.

“When I asked Pavel what BitBucket currently does, he answered,
‘It can get an up-to-date copy of Linus’ tree, and I hope to be
able to get diff between two versions in near future.’ However, as
noted by BitMover founder Larry McVoy, Pavel’s new project is not a
clone of BitKeeper, so far only an attempt to export a current
source tree. Regarding the subject tag of Pavel’s announcement
email, Larry noted, ‘that implies that BitBucket does what
BitKeeper does and nothing could be farther from the truth.’

“Complying with BitKeeper’s free BKL license, Pavel noted that
he does not use BitKeeper himself. Additionally, this current
effort does not use BitKeeper’s http interface to extract
changesets as was the case with Andrea Arcangeli’s earlier scripts.
Ben Collins also replied to Pavel’s announcement, posting further
helpful tools. When I asked Pavel what kind of response he got
after announcing BitBucket, he replied, ‘Full mailbox over weekend
😉 and very nice stuff by Ben Collins.’ A large sampling of the
lengthy discussion follows…”

Complete
Story