Source Code Management

History

Eventually, we started using CVS, and that worked well for a while.

After a while, the limitations of CVS started driving Harlan crazy, and since he is the driver of the beast, he looked for a replacment. After about 2 more YEARS of study and looking, he chose BitKeeper and has been very happy with it ever since.

In early 2005, it was announced that BitMover would be stopping its free use license for BitKeeper.

While we are looking to continue on using the commercial version of BitKeeper, people have been asking about evaluating a replacement for BitKeeper.

Requirements

• The SCM must be invisible to Dave Mills
• its use must not require any signature from anybody at UDel for its use there
• it must support file and directory renames
• it must support tracking of file/directory permission attribute changes
• it should support checkins for work-in-progress
• it must support the functionality we have with the existing triggers, described in the BitKeeper/triggers/trigger.cfg file of any ntp-dev or ntp-stable repo, which execute the following scripts:
  • BitKeeper/triggers/notify (used for debugging)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/paranoid (used for security)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/commitlogs (commit log email)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/2mirrors (updates repository mirrors)
  • BitKeeper/triggers/send (changeset email)
• it must easily support ntp-stable and ntp-dev repositories, and pulling changesets from ntp-stable to ntp-dev, and should support pulling changesets from ntp-dev to ntp-stable
• it must support integration areas
• it must be robust, reliable, and easy to use
• it must not be a pig
• it must have useful merge support
• it must have useful branch/LOD support
• it must have an easy/useful way to find when changes were made
• it must have a useful web interface

There are probably more, but this is the list off the top of my head. Oh, please also see MaintainerIssues#How_to_work_on_a_bug for how I like to handle dealing with patches and things.

SCM Matrix

Comparisons and References

• Comparision between BitKeeper and other SCM packages - bitkeeper.com
• Version Control System Comparison - better-scm.berlios.de
• Comments on OSS/FS SCM Systems
• Kernel Traffic #210 For 23 Mar 2003
• Linus on the BK withdrawal

Comments

If you would prefer to add your comment below instead of editing the table above, please do so. You can also email your comments to webmaster@ntp.org .

• One of the major gripes with P4 amoungst the FreeBSD userbase is the utter lack of decent support for anonymous r/o checkouts. In this respect, switching to perforce would make "public" access to ntp's development source much worse than it is now. -- TWikiGuest - 06 Dec 2005 15:27:22

Please comment below or edit above, as appropriate.

-- HarlanStenn - 09 May 2005