[Prophesy] Part II: Rip van Winkel Wakes up

[Daniel Phillips]

Hi, anybody who happens to still be subscribed to this mailing list!

I have promised that there would be more activity here at some point, and now 
there is.  As everybody knows, the big news is that Bitkeeper has been 
exorcised from the Linux kernel development toolchain.  That is the good 
news; the bad news is: this happened on very short notice, so we only have a 
month or so more to get a BitKeeper replacement in place.

Well the fact is, several new tools - Git, bzr-ng, Mercurial - are nearly in 
place already.  In the style of true troupers, these tools are already being 
rushed into use without being 100% ready.  The standard process of fixing 
everything up on the fly to more-or-less work is progressing well.

The part that Prophesy can play in all this is, there is all that valuable 
versioning history locked up in now-dead Bitkeeper repositories.  We would 
like to liberate that, and use it.  Tridge kindly provided an ascii database 
dumper for BitKeeper repositories, and now it seems that Prophesy just may be 
able to provide a useful link between Tridge's dump format and the native 
formats of other open source SCM systems.

See the next message for a major update of the Prophesy code in the form of a 
parser for Tridge's BK dumps, coupled to a basic versioned namespace manager.

Regards,

Daniel