BitKeeper Helps Double Pace of Linux Development

SAN FRANCISCO, March 17, 2004 /PRNewswire/ -- The pace of the Linux kernel development has more than doubled since Linus Torvalds switched to the BitKeeper source management system 2 years ago.

BitKeeper's powerful peer-to-peer model is one of the key contributors to the efficiency of the Linux kernel development. David Miller of Red Hat, a senior Linux developer, has seen the improvement first hand, "Before BitKeeper I was in merge hell every time a new kernel was released. Now I do real work instead of wasting time on repeated merging."

When comparing the rate of change in a 2-year period before switching to BitKeeper, the statistics are impressive: 

     2.3 times as many files changed (16251 vs 6992)
     2.4 times as much content changed (178MB vs 76MB)
BitKeeper's technology has enabled this worldwide development effort to scale and be more efficient and productive. The raw quantity of change illustrates how this large effort has come together so cohesively: 
     9580 changesets in the 2.4 branch [ http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.4 ]
     36076 changesets in the 2.5/2.6 branches [ http://linux.bkbits.net:8080/linux-2.5 ]
     2022 different authors
     462119 deltas over all files
Torvalds processes over 48 changesets a day, on average. Torvalds said, "I'm pretty well known for not being a huge fan of source control that gets in the way and makes it harder to merge with all the people I work with all the time. BitKeeper is different. It's made me more than twice as productive, and its fundamentally distributed nature allows me to work the way I prefer to work -- with many different groups working independently, yet allowing for easy merging between them."

Larry McVoy, BitMover's president said, "We're proud to have helped the Linux development effort. We are also grateful to the Linux community for working with us as we developed BitKeeper into a tool which can handle the daunting challenges of a world wide development effort."

The BitKeeper model has proven to be successful in the commercial world as well as in Open Source. Customers have found that BitKeeper allows their development teams to be more productive by streamlining the development process and improving time to market without sacrificing code quality.

About BitMover -- Founded in 1998, BitMover, Inc. is a privately held San Francisco based company that produces BitKeeper. BitKeeper increases productivity at companies ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 50, with more than 48,000 seats deployed worldwide. BitKeeper provides the industry's only peer-to-peer collaborative development tool that fosters best practices in development through powerful workflow capabilities, giving managers absolute control over their projects, and increasing an engineer's productivity through best-in-class merge technology. As a public service, BitMover, hosts more than 5 million files of open source containing more than 3 billion lines of code, including the Linux kernel and the MySQL database, on http://www.bkbits.net/ .

BitMover and BitKeeper are trademarks of BitMover, Inc.
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds