BitKeeper Distributed Source Control System
Welcome to BitKeeper!
BitKeeper is the original distributed source control system. Well,
sort of. Larry wrote a semi-distributed source-control system back at
Sun (productized as Teamware) and Rick had a research system of sorts,
but for better or worse, BitKeeper was the first widely used distributed
source-control system.
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).
It took a couple years. Then the PowerPC people led by Cort Dougan took
a chance on early BK. A couple years later Linus moved to it and most of
the developers followed. They stayed in it for three more years before
moving to Git because BitKeeper wasn't open source.
License
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.
Getting Started
Information on using BitKeeper can be found of the
www.bitkeeper.org website or using the
built in manpages. Try running
bk helptool for a GUI help browser.
System Requirements
The BitKeeper source tree is highly portable and compiles on most platforms.
This includes:
- Linux (x86, PPC, Arm & MIPS)
- FreeBSD
- Windows
- Solaris
and used to include IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, etc. Any Posix-like system is a
pretty easy port.
Getting Sources for Bitkeeper
Building BitKeeper
BitKeeper requires the following prerequisites to build:
- GNU make
- GNU gperf
- GNU bison
- some lex
- GNU groff
- X libraries for Tk
- tomcrypt (*)
- tommath (*)
- pcre (*)
- zlib (*)
- lz4 (*)
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.
If you are building on a Debian based Linux then the following
packages are required:
sudo apt-get install make gperf groff bison flex libxft2-dev libtommath-dev libtomcrypt-dev libpcre3-dev zlib1g-dev liblz4-dev
For Fedora and related versions of Linux the following works:
sudo yum install gcc make gperf bison flex groff pcre-devel libtomcrypt-devel libtommath-devel lz4-devel zlib-devel libXft-devel
Build using the following sequence (we build on 12 core systems;
hence the -j12 sprinkled here and there):
cd src
make -j12 p # 'p'roduction build
make image # create install image (at src/utils)
./utils/bk-*.bin # run installer created above
(make must be GNU make)
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.
Testing BitKeeper
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:
cd src
make p
cd t
./doit -j12
Look here
for help with getting regressions to pass cleanly.
Contributing to BitKeeper
See our community page for
information on how to contact us with questions or contribute
improvements.