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Comment by desdiv

10 years ago

You wouldn't, unless you have very specific niche needs. They're pretty upfront about it:

>Why use BitKeeper when there are lots of great alternatives?

>For many projects, the answer is: you shouldn’t.

https://www.bitkeeper.org/why.html

18 comments

desdiv

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luckydude  10 years ago

Probably the single biggest reason, aside from it's easier to use than git's CLI, is that it has sub-modules that work exactly like files do in a repository. No extra options, just clone/pull/push/commit/etc. Full on distributed workflow.

BitKeeper itself is a collection of repositories. Download an install image, install, and clone it:

    $ bk clone http://bkbits.net/u/bk/bugfix
    $ cd bugfix
    $ bk here
    PRODUCT
    default
    $ bk comps -m
    ./src/gui/tcltk/bwidget
    ./src/gui/tcltk/tcl
    ./src/gui/tcltk/tk
    ./src/gui/tcltk/tkcon
    ./src/gui/tcltk/tktable
    ./src/gui/tcltk/tktreectrl
    ./src/win32/dll/scc
    ./src/win32/dll/shellx
    ./src/win32/dll/shellx/src
    ./src/win32/msys
    ./src/win32/vss2bk

which shows that what we clone by default doesn't include all that other crud (we cache the build result from that and populate it as needed to do builds).

Play with it, it's very different from Git, the subrepo binding is just like file bindings. Everything works together and obeys the same timeline.

  • stonemetal  10 years ago

    It claims to be able to handle binary files well which would be a big deal to game development. They have mostly passed on git and mercurial since they can't handle game assets.

    • durin42  10 years ago

      Some game shops have had good luck with Mercurial's largefiles extension, for what it's worth.

    • AstralStorm  10 years ago

      They actually can. There is just no good way to version many file formats. Git-pack would have to be extended with support for feels compression of so many formats it is not even funny. And leaving those files outside version control is as easy as always.

      The about only difference is that git prefers the whole history and you cannot yet set per submodule shallow clone policy. It wouldn't even be too hard to add that.

      1 reply →

  • tommoor  10 years ago

    Feature set wise this has a number of great advantages over git! It's a shame all of the tools today are so git-centric in some ways

  • stephenmm  10 years ago

    If this works well than this indeed is a HUGE reason to use BK!

    • luckydude  10 years ago

      Try it and let us know. You can download the binaries at bitkeeper.org and then clone the repo like so:

          $ bk clone http://bkbits.net/u/bk/bugfix/

      type make and you should have a working BK built from source.

      6 replies →