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/me wonders when Mercurial will ever do anything other than copy BitKeeper. We've been doing this for years, my photos are in a ~100GB BK/BAM repo. Release not

/me wonders when Mercurial will ever do anything other than copy BitKeeper. We've been doing this for years, my photos are in a ~100GB BK/BAM repo. Release notes for BitKeeper version 4.1 (released 12-Oct-2007) Major features BAM support. BAM stands for "Binary Asset Management" and it adds support to BK for versioning large binaries. It solves two problems: a) one or more binary files that are frequently changed. b) collections of many large binaries where you only need a subset. The way it solves this is to introduce the concept of BAM server[s]. A BAM server manages a collection of binaries for one or more BAM clients. BAM clients may have no data present; when it is needed the data is fetched from the BAM server. In the first case above, only the tip will be fetched. Imagine that you have 100 deltas, each 10MB in size. The history is 1GB but you only need 10MB in your clone. In the second case, imagine that you have thousands of game assets distributed across multiple directories. You typically work only in one directory at a time. You will only need to fetch the subset of files that you need, the rest of the repository will have the history of what changed but no data (so bk log will work but bk cat will have to go fetch the data).

gaoshan 15y ago
To really copy BitKeeper Mercurial would need to start charging for use and come out in Basic, Pro and Enterprise editions, with things like BAM support disabled at the lowest level. Fortunately they don't do this.
- luckydude 15y ago
  It's easier to copy than it is to invent stuff, sad but true. hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech, we could have sued them out of existence years ago. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess we should be flattered :) Legalities aside, the point I've made for about a decade now is that it would be interesting to see a release announcement from hg where I went "That's cool! Why didn't we think of that?" As for the 3 levels of product, um, when you build commercial products with commercial support, you don't do that? You really want only one offering? That doesn't play well in the commercial world, we tried that. If you are just taking a dig at commercial software, sorry about that, but we have to pay for dev somehow. I'd love a way to open source the thing and make money, haven't found it.
  - tghw 15y ago
    hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech Huh? Are you claiming that Mercurial stole code from BitKeeper? Or does BitKeeper have patents on these fairly obvious concepts? I mean, a large file store on a centralized server isn't exactly a novel concept. Other than that you don't provide any examples of "illegal copies".
    - luckydude 15y ago
      It's a fairly long and pretty sordid story that ended with a certain hacker's employer sitting down with us and saying "We're not admiting that he did it, but just hypothetically speaking, suppose he did. What do you want?" And we said "we want him to stop his illegal activity". And he finally did and we dropped it, we're not on the lawyering business. We could have made a pretty big stink about it, it's not one of open source's finer moments, but all we wanted was a level playing field, we got that, we moved on.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - garenp 15y ago
        I'm guessing you're referring to this: http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ I remember that, long ago; I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting users of your product to leverage it to build a replacement nor disallowing it in the license. I think where people (including myself) have a problem, is claiming that mercurial somehow has ripped off something from BK. From vague memory, BK laid claim to using a DAG for a DVCS? I assume you must also think that if someone is first to implement something that can be trivially found in an introductory computer science text, they have a patentable claim? Ironic that "largefiles" is a user contributed extension, and that only mercurial seems to be guilty of "copying," but git must be so different that it's unworthy of being sued?
  - rdtsc 15y ago
    > we could have sued them out of existence years ago really? but you didn't, from the goodness of your heart, right?
illumen 15y ago
This isn't a new idea. Subversion has been supporting large binary files since before 2007.

gaoshan 15y ago

To really copy BitKeeper Mercurial would need to start charging for use and come out in Basic, Pro and Enterprise editions, with things like BAM support disabled at the lowest level. Fortunately they don't do this.

luckydude 15y ago
It's easier to copy than it is to invent stuff, sad but true. hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech, we could have sued them out of existence years ago. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess we should be flattered :) Legalities aside, the point I've made for about a decade now is that it would be interesting to see a release announcement from hg where I went "That's cool! Why didn't we think of that?" As for the 3 levels of product, um, when you build commercial products with commercial support, you don't do that? You really want only one offering? That doesn't play well in the commercial world, we tried that. If you are just taking a dig at commercial software, sorry about that, but we have to pay for dev somehow. I'd love a way to open source the thing and make money, haven't found it.
- tghw 15y ago
  hg has a long history of doing illegal copies of BK tech Huh? Are you claiming that Mercurial stole code from BitKeeper? Or does BitKeeper have patents on these fairly obvious concepts? I mean, a large file store on a centralized server isn't exactly a novel concept. Other than that you don't provide any examples of "illegal copies".
  - luckydude 15y ago
    It's a fairly long and pretty sordid story that ended with a certain hacker's employer sitting down with us and saying "We're not admiting that he did it, but just hypothetically speaking, suppose he did. What do you want?" And we said "we want him to stop his illegal activity". And he finally did and we dropped it, we're not on the lawyering business. We could have made a pretty big stink about it, it's not one of open source's finer moments, but all we wanted was a level playing field, we got that, we moved on.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - garenp 15y ago
      I'm guessing you're referring to this: http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ http://lwn.net/Articles/153990/ I remember that, long ago; I don't think there's anything wrong with not wanting users of your product to leverage it to build a replacement nor disallowing it in the license. I think where people (including myself) have a problem, is claiming that mercurial somehow has ripped off something from BK. From vague memory, BK laid claim to using a DAG for a DVCS? I assume you must also think that if someone is first to implement something that can be trivially found in an introductory computer science text, they have a patentable claim? Ironic that "largefiles" is a user contributed extension, and that only mercurial seems to be guilty of "copying," but git must be so different that it's unworthy of being sued?
- rdtsc 15y ago
  > we could have sued them out of existence years ago really? but you didn't, from the goodness of your heart, right?

illumen 15y ago

This isn't a new idea. Subversion has been supporting large binary files since before 2007.