Why use BitKeeper

For many projects, the answer is: you shouldn’t. For instance, Git is an excellent solution for many use-cases. But it’s not ideal for every situation. Here are some instances where BitKeeper will likely be a better solution.

Although we’re well-known for hosting the Linux kernel ten years ago, BitKeeper was actually built with commercial development projects in mind. Now you can get a commercially hardened SCM in an Open Source version.

BK/Nested allows large monolithic repositories to be easily broken up into any number of sub-repositories. Changesets, libraries, and configuration files automatically stay in sync with the full code base. Essentially, Sub-Modules that actually work!

BitKeeper’s raw speed for large projects is simply much faster than competing solutions for most common commercial configurations and operations… especially ones that include remote teams, large binary assets, and NFS file systems.

The ability to seamlessly share only a subset of your source tree allows for a great way to work with internal and external teams without imposing administrative burdens on your development team.

BitKeeper’s obsessive collection of data allows for in-depth analytics and auditing. See who made every change in the source base, when, from what computer, and what comments they attached.

Total reproducibility prevents broken builds or indeterminate states.

Not every developer on a large team can be an expert in your version control system. With BitKeeper, they don’t have to be. Commands are logical, powerful, scriptable, and follow common Unix/Linux syntax. Safeguards ensure that neophytes can’t accidentally throw the repository into chaos, lose their work, or cause broken builds.

Every filesystem access of revision controlled data includes a checksum to ensure data integrity. All data is written with a redundant encoding to allow common filesystem and hardware failures to be detected and corrected. A flipped bit of memory won’t corrupt your data.