BitKeeper

The BitKeeper history needs to be written up but the short version is that it happened because Larry wanted to help Linux not turn into a bunch of splintered factions like 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, etc. He saw that the problem was one of tooling. He built a team and built BitKeeper so the kernel guys would have a reasonable tool and no need to split up the team (the problem was that Linus refused to use any source management system: "they all suck!" which wasn't bad for him but really sucked for the downstream people who had to merge everything by hand each time Linus released). BitKeeper is now distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It is free to use and free to modify. There are some open source components and they have their own licenses. The BitKeeper source tree is highly portable and compiles on most platforms. This includes: and used to include IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, etc. Any Posix-like system is a pretty easy port. The requirement marked with ( ) are optional, if not installed locally and BitKeeper is currently installed and we are building from a BitKeeper repository then local copies of these requirements will be automatically populated and included. cd src make -j12 p 'p'roduction build make image create install image (at src/utils) ./utils/bk- .bin run installer created above If bk fails to locate your pre-installed libraries then edit the file src/conf.mk.local to provide the needed information. If you want to share the config with others please label it like " Macos with homebrew" and put the configs commented out in there and send us a patch. Building on Windows requires msys and is more involved. See the thread on the forum about Windows builds. An extensive regression suite is found in src/t and can be run using the doit script in that directory. The test harness can be run in parallel using multiple cores like so: See our community page for information on how to contact us with questions or contribute improvements.