Self-introduction

Eric S. Raymond here. Some of you know me of old.

I've signed up because I want to help head BitKeeper off at the pass.
McVoy's design looks good but his license is insidious. Having
surveyed the alternatives, (a) the CVS codebase is too brittle, (b)
PRCS doesn't handle distributed development well enough, and (c) Aegis
may be a fundamentally better design than any CVS workalike, but
prospects of migrating the world to it from CVS seem dim. That's my
present evaluation, anyway.

So my goal is to find out where you guys are, and if I judge that you
look like the best bet to funnel some people and resources your way.
I may contribute a few ideas (I gave McVoy the idea for the changeset
abstraction in BitKeeper back in 1998) but probably not heavy coding;
I've got my hands full with fetchmail and CML2 and a couple other
projects.

I'm expert enough with version-control systems to have written the
vc mode in GNU Emacs and been the first-line technical reviewer for a
book on such systems. Years ago when CVS was just a pup, I roughed out
and circulated for comment a description of a distributed RCS-based
system. But CVS took over while I was doing other things and I never
implemented DRCS.

Anyway. Since I signed up, I've seen a lot of relatively low-level
conversation about implementation. What's happening architecturally?
How many months do you think you are from being able to field a
drop-in CVS replacement? Are there migration tools? The design
document is out of date, which is a bad sign -- is anyone responsible
for fixing that.

(One way I *can* help directly is with document editing. I'm pretty
good with English, and it's the kind of task that can be done in small
pieces between coding runs.)

-- 
		Eric S. Raymond
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of
authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was
made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There
are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to
govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
	-- Daniel Webster