FreeBSD Perforce repository? Just say no!

Posted on October 7th, 2007 by Yousef Ourabi

The FreeBSD project does release its release engineering out of a public CVS repository. However as you may or may not know there is a Perforce repository where some of the developer and “corporate” contributions go.

The apparent logic being that there needs to be a separate repository for “experimental” (and corporate) projects that are not ready to be merged into CVS (from this Perforce primer: http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/p4-primer.txt ). What is particularly worrisome is that Scott mentions that the p4 binary is “freely” available for download on UNIX systems including FreeBSD. Freely available, but is it free as in freedom. No.

I find this whole argument a bit concerning for two reasons: 1) You could just have an experimental directory / module in CVS where all this stuff went without affecting the release process 2) Having experimental code in a separate repository managed by proprietary creates an unnecessary barrier to entry.

I think its about time FreeBSD ditches Perforce.

Resources:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/p4-primer/article.html#SYNCING

http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/p4-primer.txt

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-August/035476.html

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Filed under: BSD


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  • Pragmatist
    You're barking up the wrong tree. FreeBSD has always been less dogmatic than Linux. They've always been more corporate-friendly, and happier to exchange ideas both ways. For them, open-source is a tool to get a great operating system built collaboratively. It's not a way of life or a philosophy.

    Perforce is a much superior SCM system than CVS, and handles the sort of complicated, multi-way merges that are common in the OS world. Microsoft uses a Perforce derivative, including for NT development. Google and Amazon use Perforce. (The Slashdotters got all upset when they found out Google was using Perforce. I'm sure you're upset too.)

    Are you running a computer with a chip made by Intel or AMD? You know, there are open-source chips available. "Free as in freedom," right?
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