Torvalds Unveils New Linux Control System

BlakeCaldwell writes "CNet reports: 'Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds has launched a new tool, called Git, to manage his software project, after a dispute led him to drop the previous system.' He will start using Git instead of BitKeeper to control the flow of updates and track changes in the kernel." We've covered this previously. Relatedly, ChocLinux writes "Jeremy Allison, who wrote Samba with Andrew 'Tridge' Tridgell, is sticking up for his friend in the row over BitKeeper. "

Newsflash!

[starmang]

Slashdot is about a week behind! Ever hear of kerneltrap.org? *sigh*

zdnet.co.uk

[fish34]

What an awful zdnet article, "But now it seems that some open source developers haven't kept up their end of the bargain. " Tridge wasn't bound the by the license. "Tridgell's decision to reverse-engineering Bitkeeper. The resulting clone would violate BitMover's intellectual property -- something McVoy wasn't going to sit back and watch happen." Again, no, it wouldn't. My understanding is that reverse engineering for interoperability is legally fine. Think of Samba..

More tridge news here....

[gowen]

Reverse engineering BitKeeper for fun and profit [theregister.co.uk]

groklaw has some info on recent Tridge spotting

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200504210 23821174

Tridge tells what he did

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is the logical place to note the newest Groklaw story, Tridge Speaks [groklaw.net] where Tridge tells his side of the story, or at least a brief overview from his perspective.

Based on Monotone it seems

[Carl]

The monotone hackers have the same design as this new git tool. They already adapted their visualisation tools to make pretty screenshots of the kernel patches development history: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/monotone-devel/2 005-04/msg00183.html [gnu.org]

Re:Git?

[PeterBrett]

Yes, that's right; from the git README [ehlo.org]:

"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood.

- random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not
actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a
mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.
- stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the
dictionary of slang.
- "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually
works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.
- "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks

Re:Git?

[Saunalainen]

Indeed - Linus has already explained [idg.com.au] the reasoning behind this name.

What GIT Means.

[chkorn]

Linus definition of GIT:

"git" can mean anything, depending on your mood. - random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronounciation of "get" may or may not be relevant. - stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang. - "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room. - "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks

Re:Git?

[PhuckFonix]

git n : a person who is deemed to be despicable or contemptible; "only a rotter would do that"; "kill the rat"; "throw the bum out"; "you cowardly little pukes!"; "the British call a contemptible person a `git'" [syn: rotter, dirty dog, rat, skunk, stinker, stinkpot, bum, puke, crumb, lowlife, scum bag, so-and-so] Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

Re:Nice Timing!

[jdmetz]

If you follow the Linux Kernel mailing list at all, it has been fairly apparent for the past week at least that Linus would be using "git" to manage the kernel. He has been putting a lot of time into it. So, my guess is, yes - the editors had "inside" knowledge

ARCH embraces GIT too

[diegocgteleline.es]

http://lists.seyza.com/pipermail/gnu-arch-dev/2005 -April/001097.html [seyza.com]

Re:Git?

[Arathrael]

It sure is, I believe it's derived from the Scottish term get, usually used to refer to an illegitimate child. 'Git' itself is used more broadly though, in much the same way as 'bastard' is.

Re:Newsflash!

[Anonymous Coward]

GIT is under active development and the fact that exist doesn't mean it will be the "definitive" tool, althought it will probably do. I think it can be considered a "0.1 version". There has not been "official release" of git, they're just testing it

Tridge Speaks

[anandpur]

From Groklaw [groklaw.net]

Groklaw's stevem heard Tridge's speech today at the LCA 2005 conference, Australia's national Linux conference, and he has a report for us:

This was taken from my memory of Dr. Andrew Tridgell's keynote at this years LCA2005 Conference.
Essentially Tridge did *NOT* do anything that anyone could ever possibly ever take as breaking a BitKeeper licence, as far as I can see. How was it done? He, like any good sysadmin would, first off telnetted to the BitKeeper port on a BitKeeper server.

$ telnet thunk.org 5000
WhooHoo! Connection! So, next obvious step that we *all* do is type in the obvious:

help
Back came a list of commands to manipulate the BitKeeper server and ask things of it. Well, according to Tridge, a bit of reading of the LKML (Linux Kernel Email List) shows that the "clone" command is the way to checkout someones source code repository.

So Tridge's massive "reverse engineering" project came down to a single line of shell script:

$ echo clone | nc thunk.org 5000 > e2fsprogs.dat
Hey presto, Tridge has just checked out from a BitKeeper repository into the file e2fsprogs.dat.

The audience was laughing and cheering Tridge on as he explained just what a Mountain had been made of this Molehill. And I mean made by both sides of the issue -- those who he said he was some Uber Reverse Engineering Wizard and those who claimed that he MUST have used a BK client.

Funny report, isn't it? Anyway, now you know Tridge's side of the story.

The ZDNet article gets it wrong

[slavemowgli]

There's two major flaws in the ZDNet article, really - outside of the fact that they unfortunately buy into McVoy's lies and FUD, they get two things outright wrong.

1) BitKeeper's "free" license does not say that you can't use BK to work on a competing product - it says that you cannot work on a competing product AT ALL, no matter whether you use BK for it or not.

2) It's not true that Tridge hasn't "kept up their end of the bargain". He never used BK at all, so why would he be bound by BK's license? McVoy may not like what Tridge did, but let's face it, reverse engineering for compatibility is perfectly acceptable - even the much-maligned DMCA explicitely allows it, because lawmakers realized that it's important.

So, McVoy can rant and rave all he wants - the fact remains that HE is the one who did not keep up his end of the "bargain". The bargain was that kernel developers get to use BK for free, and BitMover gets free advertising - now that the company has established itself, it doesn't need that sort of advertising anymore, so they're just looking for a convenient excuse to pull the plug on the "free" BK.

The fact that McVoy doesn't admit that is probably to be expected, but still, it doesn't change the fact that he spreads just as much FUD and lies as Darl McBride, Laura DiDio, Maureen O'Gara, Steve Balmer and so on.

I, for one, sure hope he gets what he deserves.

Re:License anyone?

[pe1rxq]

Yep, GPL (v2)...

Its in the file called 'COPYING'.....

Up and running!

[anpe]

Today in the lkml

Subject:Linux 2.6.12-rc3

Linus Torvalds
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:00:21 -0700

Ok,
you know what the subject line means by now, but this release is a bit
different from the usual ones, for obvious reasons. It's the first in a
_long_ time that I've done without using BK, and it's the first one ever
that has been built up completely with "git".

Complete message here [mail-archive.com]

Re:Eh?

[Linux_ho]

Yeah, my favorite line in the article:

There is even a

conspiracy theory [slashdot.org] on news site Slashdot that the anti-Torvalds rhetoric may have the underlying aim of persuading the open source community to switch to Hurd -- an alternative to the Linux kernel that is being developed by the Free Software Foundation.

It was a JOKE. Note the (Score:5, Funny) tag. Just an FYI for all you non-geek journalists reading Slashdot: if you're not laughing, you should interpret (Score:5, Funny) as a clue that some piece of geek humor may have just gone way over your head. Do not take comments on Slashdot seriously, especially if you see (Score:5, Funny). This would be a mistake.

This has been a public service announcement from the Geek Nation Communication Explanation Foundation.

Re:zdnet.co.uk

[DrSkwid]

not so hard to reverse engineer [theregister.co.uk]

telnet bitkeeper 5000
Connected to bitkeeper.
Escape character is '^]'.
help

Found its directory on Kernel.org's ftp

[Newtonian_p]

I found this on kernel.org:
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ [kernel.org]

It's empty at the moment but we'll probably be seeing the source code appearing in it soon.

Re:Tridge Speaks

[stevey]

nc is netcat, and it's a very useful tool. It does way more than telnet.

I wrote an introduction to netcat [debian-adm...ration.org] if you're interested in exploring it.

Linus and Monotone

[Anonymous Coward]

Monotone changelog: http://www.venge.net/monotone/NEWS

Sun Apr 10 17:49:25 PDT 2005

0.18 release. performance improvements, features, and bug fixes.
This release is dedicated to Shweta Narayan.

- most operations sped up by a factor of 2 or better; many sped up by up several orders of magnitude.
- special thanks to Matt Johnston ([e-mail]), Derek Scherger ([e-mail]), Linus Torvalds ([e-mail]).

Darcs embraces GIT too

[sleepingsquirrel]

Might as well mention that it looks like Darcs [abridgegame.org] is getting the git religion also.

Re:Git?

[$rtbl_this]

Alternatively, it could be derived from the Arabic for a pregnant camel [english2american.com]. As far as I know, it's one of those words whose origin is lost in the mists of time.

NAME CLASH !!!!!!!

[psergiu]

A software package named git - also known as the 'Gnu Interactive Tools' - allready exists.

http://www.gnu.org/software/git/git.html

Think at it as a combination on Midnight Commander with emacs keybindings & config. Me and a lot of people use this usefull shell.

So please change the name of this source versioning package.

Re:I thought...

[brett_sinclair]

a (better) frontend must be coded

A better frontend is already coded. See git-pasky [pasky.or.cz].

It is early days, of course, but this git should be easy enough to use for anyone who's been using cvs, subversion or the others. You do "git commit", "git commit", "git log", etc. And it's fast. On my poor laptop, "git diff" takes 0.1 second over the entire 235M kernel source.

This is the frontend to Linus' git stuff, and may be renamed Cogito to prevent confusion.

Re:wow, that has some rough edges alright

[iabervon]

Someone's already written a version that supports deltas. The issue is that the deltas are each the size of the complete file, because in most filesystems a file's size is rounded up to a 4K block. So if you have a 7K source file and you change it, storing the whole thing compressed is 4K, and storing a delta is also 4K, plus you need the old version of the file to apply the delta to.

Additionally, using deltas means that if you want to combine two commits, you need to create a new representation of the files for the combined change; with full files, you get create a commit that goes from the first tree to the last tree, both of which you're already storing.

It's counterintuitive, but deltas aren't really efficient in practice.

Re:It's a shame...

[[Xorian]]

I probably should have included a link to the post I made to the git mailing list with some more details [gmane.org].

Re:NAME CLASH !!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just did an "apt-get install git" expecting to get the versioning control software, and it installed GNU Interactive Tools, not what I was expecting. Change the name before its too late and you end up just confusing people like what happened with Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.