Of course, there is also GNU Arch, a C-based revision control system, of which bazaar-ng is attempting to be protocol-compatible with.  It'll be interesting to see how the two projects build off each other.  I've invested a lot of my time into GNU arch, and I'm quite happy with it. I should probably test out bazaar-ng one of these days, and Monotone looks pretty interesting.

Regarding darcs, I would disagree it is a contender for large projects with a great number of changesets.  Because of its design, darcs consumes a lot of memory, a flaw acknowledged by its developers.  Perhaps they're getting a handle on it; only time will tell.

In any case, Linux kernel developement appears to have a fairly standard way of exchanging patches and there seem to be a few interesting utilities (see quilt) that'll help them out.
Posted by Chad Walstrom at Thu Apr 7 08:41:10 2005

Personally I think it's a terrible shame Linus ever went with BK.  It was just a slap in the face of the community, and seemed to alienate a lot of people in a very personal way.  Yeah, yeah, nothing was quite like BK -- but free software developers have always put up with the tools they have to create an inclusive process.  That's how the tools get better, and that's how collective development works.

And in the meantime a lot of work has been totally wasted building a toolset around BK, with CVS mirrors and all that junk.  And it's not just that the move away from BK invalidated that work -- everyone knew how wasteful that work was at the time.  BK's licensing was aggressive and downright offensive to developers who wanted to resolve the versioning situation for free software.  It created this huge political issue that imposed a real technical burden.  Honestly Linus's justifications always seemed terribly self-centered, in an large developer community where that really seemed unreasonable.

But I guess he's changed his mind, so that's good.
Posted by Ian Bicking at Thu Apr 7 09:45:08 2005

Monotone seems to have LUA embedded in it, so it trumps all the others :-)
Posted by Lyndon Samson at Thu Apr 7 11:35:37 2005

Chad,

I've tried GNU Arch, and while I like the ideas, I found the user interface to be quite poor, which made it too annoying to use.  It also (last time I looked) didn't work well on Windows.  I know that free software people don't care about that, but I want to be able to collaborate with people who work on Windows.

I've no investment in any of these systems right now.  I'd be happy to see one truly good one.  If there were two, that would be a great problem to have.

Ian,

When you have a dictatorship model, people will get alienated.  The only question is whether enough people will get alienated enough to fork.  If it wasn't over BK, it would have been (and may still be) over something else.  Whey you work on Linux, you play in Linus' sandbox.

The fact that free software people are willing to trade off good in favor of free is one of the reasons that I don't consider myself a free software person.  While free is important to me, good is also important.  BK had the effect of catalyzing people into trying to build something that is good which is also free.  I honestly don't know if that would have happened had BK not been present.  We'll have to wait and see whether they succeed.
Posted by Ted Leung at Thu Apr 7 23:34:19 2005