[conspire] (forw) Re: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html

Wed Jul 6 15:57:30 PDT 2011

Wow, it's really as if I were some sort of walking magnet for the most
problematic coders in open source.  First, Dan Bernstein blusters his
way into my mailbox and builds up to veiled legal complaints about my 
'rants' pages' explanation of why I personally eschew DJBware.  Then, 
Larry McVoy e-mails and telephones me at the height of BitKeeper's
popularity to complain about http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html#bk
and try to bully me into whitewashing that page's coverage of his
product's history.

And now, Mr. 'Linux sucks and there's no compatibility problem between
CDDL and GPL' comes wandering by.  Am I going to collect the whole set?
Is Theo de Raadt next?

----- Forwarded message from Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> -----

Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:23:11 +0200
From: Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de>
To: rick at linuxmafia.com
Subject: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html

Hi, 

I just read parts of http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html and like to 
correct some statements from this page and to give some additional hints:

-	The currently maintained SCCS version that is seen on 
	http://sccs.berlios.de is based on the Sun source of SCCS and Sun 
	introduced support for binary files in late 1986, so this version of
	SCCS offers support for binary files since almost 25 years.

-	The SCCS source code is 100% CDDL, so it may be a good idea, to remove 
	the GPL/LGPL entries from the SCCS section on your page.

-	http://blog.fxa.org/articles/2005/09/30/bzr-weaving-its-way-to-the-front
	seems to be dead link

-	If you like to call the command line interface from SCCS confusing, you
	would of course need to call the command line interface from RCS no less
	confusing.

-	I have no idea why people like to call RCS "more advanced" than SCCS.
	Do you have any confirmation for this?

-	SCCS seems to be the fastest revision control system I was able to test.
	I recently added support for mass entering of projects and got these
	results:

	Entering the whole OpenSolaris base OS sources (500 MB in > 46000 files)
	takes 17 seconds on tmpfs on a 6 year old 2.4 Ghz Opteron system. This 
	is 2700 files per second and 30 MB/s. 

-	I am planning to enhance SCCS to become a distributed system with
	atomic operations soon. The upcomming version 5.1 already added many 
	smaller new features that can be implemented without breaking 
	compatibility to the history file format.

Thank you for your collection

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2011 15:52:01 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de>
Subject: Re: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Joerg Schilling (Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de):

> I just read parts of http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html and like to 
> correct some statements from this page and to give some additional hints:
> 
> -	The currently maintained SCCS version that is seen on 
> 	http://sccs.berlios.de is based on the Sun source of SCCS and Sun 
> 	introduced support for binary files in late 1986, so this version of
> 	SCCS offers support for binary files since almost 25 years.

Glad to hear it, Joerg.  I'm well aware of your heroic role in writing
and rejuvenating code on Solaris and (with some amount of prejudice,
which is entirely your prerogative) for other Unixes.  Also, thank you
very much for your creation and support of BerliOS.

Though you might be mislead by my domain name into thinking the
contrary, I am quite fond of Solaris (though you'll forgive me for smiling
more on Illumos / Openindiana and Nexenta, and yes I am also aware of
SchilliX).  I'm also a fan of the CDDL licence as an improvement on MPL,
and highly suitable for some purposes, especially where it is desirable
to plan for interoperation on a code module level with proprietary code.

I'm leery of those who assert there's no licence conflict between CDDL
and GPL -- and I have not forgotten the cdrtools fiasco and your
extremely non-constructive behaviour when challenged -- but it's not
2006 any more, so let's move past that, shall we?

> -	The SCCS source code is 100% CDDL, so it may be a good idea, to remove 
> 	the GPL/LGPL entries from the SCCS section on your page.

I am unlikely to summarily remove the material concerning GPL/LGPL code
that preceded yours.  What I _might_ do is research the change history
of your CDDL codebase, to see if your CDDL-covered codebase mentioned
starting in
https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/sccs-devel/2011-May/000000.html
appears to be a derivative work (as that term is used in copyright law)
of someone else's work, and to determine whether you have created yet
another licence conflict by doing so.

Let me be very blunt, Joerg:  You have a history of doing that.  Nobody
with a competent understanding of software law has ever agreed with your
past interpretations of licence compatibility issues under copyright
law, and, in particular, I most certainly do not.  

Therefore, it is a relevant question whether your revised SCCS codebase
has a clear and unproblematic copyright status.  _If_ I have sufficient
time and interest, I might start there.  I also most certainly will
amend my pages to attempt to mention your work -- and do so in a
charitable and encouraging spirit.

I should also be blunt about this:  As of right now, July 6, 2011, I
_personally_ just cannot bring myself to care very much about SCCS,
though I am honestly delighted that you are working on it, and hope to
see remarkable things emerge from your efforts in the future.  My
attitude may be short-sighted.  I have been known to change my mind, and
hope that happens.

Thank you for mentioning
http://blog.fxa.org/articles/2005/09/30/bzr-weaving-its-way-to-the-front
having become a dead link.  I have replaced that with the final Internet
Archive link.  For your interest and convenience, that is:
http://classic-web.archive.org/web/20061006032137/http://blog.fxa.org/articles/2005/09/30/bzr-weaving-its-way-to-the-front

(It's only a very brief piece citing the benefits of weave format.)

I'm not going to argue with you about opinions reflected in 
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/vcs.html .  Some of those are from my own
past experience; some is a paraphrase of people whose views I respected
and trusted at the time.  I frankly lack the time and interest to even
review such matters, right now.

If it'll help, I _do_ take your own opinions seriously, though, so I 
will ponder them and you might find my views changing.  If not, you're 
welcome to consider me unenlightened or ignorant, and you might be
right.

Anyway, I very much thank you for taking on the job of further
developing SCCS, and I will eagerly await your new versions.

----- End forwarded message -----