Re: Warning to Debian Developers regarding BitKeeper

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Brian May <bam@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 11:24:03PM -0700, Walter Landry wrote:
> > Arch has supported since the beginning basically all of the operations
> > that bitkeeper has.  It just doesn't have the fancy gui and a few of
> > the convenience functions.
> 
> How does arch handle merging conflicts?
> 
> This is one aspect I haven't tested...

This is a bit complicated, so I'll give you the short form.  When arch
merges two trees that were once related to each other, it only applies
patches made since the last two trees were synced.  So if you made
local modifications, you only have to tell arch once not to overwrite
them.  Or you may not have to tell arch that at all.

Actually doing the merge is still grunt work.  As I said, it doesn't
have the slick gui that BitKeeper has.  I'm working on that, but don't
expect any miracles.

> > Since Tom Lord stopped working on arch, development has continued at
> > 
> >   www.fifthvision.net/Arch
> 
> Interesting....
> 
> I thought development seemed to be slowing down, hopefully it
> will speed up now (if it hasn't already).

Well, the improvements in the last month and a half include sftp and
http support, a tutorial, an emacs mode, simplified output, and, of
course, the usability bug mentioned above.  One of my goals is to fix
all of the bugs listed in the BTS soon.  There is also plenty of
discussion on the mailing list, although there was an outage recently
as the lists were moved from ezmlm to mailman.

Anyway, that's enough arch advocacy for now.  You may now return to
your regularly scheduled flame-war :)

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu