Dear all,
BitMover Inc has recently decided to withdraw its open license, and we are going to be forced to change our CM system for openEHR. This is a huge disappointment, since BitKeeper really is the rolls-royce application in its class, and is ideally suited to open development. However, they have made a decision, and given some leeway for people like us to change. I am not 100% sure of what you will be experiencing currently if you try to do a pull with your current copy of BK; if you are experiencing problems, please let us know.
Some people may be thinking "told you so", but as a quick defence of our choice I would note:
- we placed quite some weight on Linus Torvalds' choice of BK 2 years ago, and also some other large open source projects
- we started using BK in openEHR at the end of 1993. THe most likely alternative, Subversion, was much less mature then
- the choice has absolutely minimised our manual work in CM for the period we have had it.
We will most likely move to subversion, and set up a subversion server on openEHR.org. Subversion is essentially the "new CVS" and handles moves and renames properly, and also has some semblance of change sets. The biomedical engineering group at the university of Valencia where I have been for the last couple of days have been using it for a while and report no problems, and showed me integrations with Eclipse and JBuilder. (Not sure if refactoring inside those tools does the right things to Subversion, but we'll test that).
Unless anyone in the community has some strong reason or evidence why subversion would not be a good choice, we will migrate in the next few weeks. We cannot guarantee that all interior versions of openEHR repositories will be kept intact when migrating the files, but we will do our best.
We will announce further details as we know them.
- thomas beale