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Re: Warning to Debian Developers regarding BitKeeper



Brian May wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 09:22:28AM +0200, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> > Because Bitkeeper is, at the moment, the only tool which works reasonably
> > well for kernel development (100% decentralized operation, support file
> > renames, remember merge operations reliably, et al.)
> 
> arch theoritically does all of that two.
> 
> Only it isn't 100% reliable right now.
> 
> eg. for file renames, it marks the file as renamed in
> each "patch" version, but fails to rename the file.
> 
> I sometimes wonder what breakage this is going
> to cause when the problem gets fixed...
> -- 
> Brian May <bam@debian.org>

I feel compelled to defend arch's honor at this point.  This
particular problem (of "larch move" not actually moving files, just
metadata), has been fixed for several weeks.  And no, it didn't break
anything when it was fixed.

Arch does have problems right now, but reliability is not one of them.
I don't know of any circumstances where data has been lost.

The biggest problem is that arch is slow.  Also, it's documentation is
sub-par.  Finally, it doesn't have a real, end-to-end integrity check.
It only has integrity checks for individual patch-sets.  But I want to
emphasize that we don't know of anyone who has lost data.

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.

Since Tom Lord stopped working on arch, development has continued at

  www.fifthvision.net/Arch

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu



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