Due to severe problems with the scheduled migration of KDE's massive source code repository from the CVS revision control system to Subversion, the KDE project has decided to opt for the BitKeeper source control system as the more pragmatic choice. The full press release follows; further details on what this will mean to KDE developers and contributors requiring repository access will be posted shortly to the KDE Wiki.
KDE Chooses BitKeeper for Source Code Repository
Yesterday, the KDE e.V. signed an agreement with BitMover, Inc. to allow all KDE developers to use the latest BitKeeper client tool at no charge. The arrangement comes in anticipation of KDE's full-scale adoption of the BitKeeper source control suite.
The KDE project had been using CVS for a number of years, but due to persistent and crippling limitations it was finally decided to convert the massive source repository to Subversion, a next-generation CVS clone with fewer limitations. Unfortunately, due to many unresolved issues and technical problems with Subversion, the move has proven impossible.
"A repository of KDE's size poses issues that the creators of Subversion would never have thought of," declared KDE release dude Stephan Coolio.
After an intense internal debate, it was finally decided that BitKeeper would be the most appropriate choice for a new revision control system, given its proven superiority and track record in the Open Source community. BitKeeper has enjoyed wide-spread success and praise as the official source code repository for the GNU/Linux kernel.
KDE's repository will now be hosted on the same server as the GNU kernel.
"We are glad to support KDE by helping it move to BitKeeper. The Linux kernel developers have proven the reliability of BitKeeper in distributed development and KDE will now be able to take full advantage of that," said BitKeeper author Larry McFly.
KDE e.V. board member Mirko Bohemian stated, "Following our licencing deal with BitMover, we expect our developers will be twice as productive, just as the GNU kernel developers are now." Linus Torvalds was not available for comment.
The only significant drawback of the deal is that KDE developers will not be
allowed to work on or contribute to any other source control systems as
mandated by the BitKeeper license. To comply with this requirement, KDE has
temporarily removed Cervisia from the kdesdk module until the CVS support can be replaced by full BitKeeper functionality.
However, like the GNU/Linux kernel repository, KDE will be available through a
read-only CVS interface for anyone preferring not to use BitKeeper for idealistic reasons.
As a matter of pragmatism, the KDE project believes it is time to move forward and embrace next-generation software source control.
Kalle Chrysler Daimler, President of the KDE e.V. Board commented, "While
we expect some belated opposition from within our developer community to
show up in the next few days, this move was really the only sane and pragmatic choice for the KDE project. We are now in good form to move towards KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 in the coming months."
Comments
Ah!!!
OK, today is April 1st. Pufff, you've scared me.
Shit! That really scared me :O
NO!!!!!!
;)
Could have had me, except the "GNU kernel" bit really was trolling a bit too far...
This is factual. The GNU project has officially adopted the Linux kernel in favor of Heard. I hurd RMS say this myself.
> I hurd RMS say this myself.
ROFL... wuaha ... ! ! ! great
Larry McFly, Stephan Coolio, Cervisia removed...
Great stuff guys, you really made my day. Who was the mastermind behind this one? Daniel Molkentin, are you guilty as charged?
Yes, this is a good one... I wonder if any news sites will pick this up as "real" like some did with last years joke. That even had a cvs project that backed it up :-D.
-Sam
P.S - I liked the wiki entry, nice touch!
Looks like RootPrompt has posted it today; it being April 4 now, either they were fooled, or they celebrate April Fool's WEEK.
http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=8524
It was quite the team effort. :)
I kicked off the idea, but I really have to credit Kurt, Jonathan and Navindra for making it perfect and adding their own twists.
You actually got me there for a while... prepare to be slashdotted though, I can't wait to read the outrage that's going to happen there!!
>>> ...prepare to be slashdotted..... <<<
I dont think so.
The authors gave the game away be using the weird name modifications, and making it a too obvious April Fool's story with some of the details. The first comment noticed the fake already.
But anyways -- very nice plot. I spilled my coffee by laughing too loud and suffering from convulsions when reading it, even if the it was obvious from the start that "something is wrong with this."
LinuxToday posted it.
And LWN.net
The circle is now complete. Slashdot has it now.
It's April 1st, but it would not have been a bad idea.
.. that the BitMover guys know what a joke is and won't try to find a legal way to harras KDE for this stunt ;-)
Don't think that will be a problem as he obviously has a sense of humor, did you not see his proposed "no whiners license":-)
Don't worry. We all thought it was very funny.
-Wayne
It is probably a coincidence that this press release came just four days later:
http://www.bitkeeper.com/press/2005-04-05.html
If not, then they really didn't find it funny at all.
It's a coincidence, http://lwn.net/Articles/130681/ talks about "a conflict over the last month or two".
Great, I post one single comment to this forum. And three days layter I start receiving spam on that address. Shouldn't it be possible to hide the email address from the page?
People still get spam? Try Spamassassin...
Spamassassin catches about four hundred spams a day for me. Spambayes run via KMail on the rest of my mail catches another sixty. That leaves about thirty spams that end up in my inbox every day.
It's gonna be subversion soon... wugawaga
"Novell executives gave the impression that the Gnome and KDE open source desktop environments are not quite up to competing with Windows, but it is getting excited about the version of KDE that will accompany SuSE Linux 10 next year. This is based on Mono, another Novell takeover, which aims to provide a development environment that will run Java and Microsoft.net on Linux. The demos look fantastic but the timing of the launch may clash with Microsoft's release of Longhorn."
- The Guardian
I guess that's why Miguel de Icaza got a CVS account: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=111233809718017&w=2
Allowed him by Davbin Muellow, no less...
Bizarre!
Is this one as well (they can't be serious, right):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1448108,00.html
Quote from the text:
Novell executives gave the impression that the Gnome and KDE open source desktop environments are not quite up to competing with Windows, but it is getting excited about the version of KDE that will accompany SuSE Linux 10 next year. This is based on Mono, another Novell takeover, which aims to provide a development environment that will run Java and Microsoft.net on Linux. The demos look fantastic but the timing of the launch may clash with Microsoft's release of Longhorn.
Hey, i've been in a business meeting with them where they state that WinD0wS
RuLeZ, but hey - what's a Mono based KDE? :)
It was posted on Thursday March 31, 2005.
never heard about time zones ?
it was the 31st in britain, so it's probably not aprils fools indeed. the reporter probably didn't know what s/he was writing
So what, in Germany,Italy,France,Spain,Belgium,... it was 1st April since the date is 31st,March > 11PM GMT
I always bite on these because it's still March 31st here in Oregon for a few hours. However the names got progressively worse and by Kalle it was way over the top, not to mention a few other things. Thankfully now all I have to be concerned with is rewriting everything in Mono. ;-)
I'm glad I'm not the only one in Oregon that fell for it.
"While we expect some belated opposition from within our developer community to show up in the next few days..."
You bet! Can't wait to see what KDE bloggers at http://planetkde.org are going to say about this.
What KDE bloggers on planetkde.org? (try it)
Those sneaky Gnome devs.
I'm sure they're just feeling pretty good about themselves over at http://planet.gnome.org/
(Alas, no HTML allowed in postings on the Dot. Thank goodness for highlight-and-middle-click though.)
I must say, the quality of this years jokes is pretty good :-).
True, G12 story over at the Gnome place was particularly good. Not only all the work gone into making it, but the introducing of the revolutionary compulsory subscriptions system was a really great. Perhaps something for KDE too, if they don't have a patent pending or something that is:-)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/davyd/139147.html
Oh boy, you KDE and GNOME guys really got me laughing my ass off! This is a great April fools joke! :)
Haha! I just tried to load http://planet.gnome.org/ as well. :-)
Lol the G12 project (gnome 2.12) is the best.
Far ahead from Microsoft with their super-high-tech credit card system.
;o)
Good one, Daniel! Had me fooled for a moment - fortunately I skimmed other articles before replying so the date settled in. :-)
Very cool. I esp. like Kalle Chrysler Daimler :-)
I read the first line and, being the geek I am, got side-tracked by the link. I read the entire thread to see what the problem resolution was. When I saw they fixed the problem (short version: merging 70K files used to take 512MB, now uses 8MB) I came back to find out if it was really a joke.
And I swore last year I wasn't gonna get suckered into any lame April Fools posts. That's what I get for staying up till 5:30 in the morning.
Cheers,
Chipper02
I started my day with a good laugh!!!
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=111236615812956&w=2