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List:       bitkeeper-users
Subject:    Re: [Bitkeeper-users] updating a 3rd party source
From:       Larry McVoy <lm () bitmover ! com>
Date:       2003-11-17 15:53:55
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On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 11:12:16AM -0800, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 07:16, Greg Lonnon wrote:
> 
> > It would be nice to have a master repo with childern
> > repos of linux, redboot, and a filesystem.  For example, the linux repo
> > would be a clone from Linus repo.  A clone on the master would also
> > clone it's childern.
> 
> What you're looking for is what the BK people call "nested
> repositories".  I think every new BK user asks for this feature.
> 
> Larry has said for a while that his team is working on this, but I don't
> know what the current status is.
> 
> For what it's worth, I think the reason that BK doesn't yet have this
> feature is that it's quite possible to live without it, and not really
> much bother.

We have a design for this and the design is sweet.  But we are not coding
it because we are customer driven.  Let me be more clear about that,
it's complicated.  The way we work is this:  suppose a customer gives
us N dollars for BK.  We mentally set aside 15% of N as "their" money.
The customer can direct us (to a point) to spend that money on whatever
they want, it's their silver bullet to use to rearrange our priorities.

This is not part of our commercial contract, by the way, it's too weird
and the lawyers freak out.  But it is how we think.

The effect is that we tend to work on what the customers want, where
customer is defined as an existing customer, not a potential customer.

So what does this have to do with nested repositories?  It's exactly as
Bryan says.  Everyone wants them during the sales process and 2 weeks 
after the rollout if we ask if they still want them the answer is always
"shrug, I don't think we really need them, they would be nice, but what 
we really want is ...".

Believe me, I'd _love_ to get a big sale where nested repositories was
part of the deal.  Not having them makes the sales cycle suck.  But we're
committed to helping our existing customers, not our imaginary customers,
and our existing customers don't care about this.  They want the bug
database, they want better GUI tools, they want better performance, etc.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy              lm at bitmover.com          http://www.bitmover.com/lm
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