BitKeeper

What BitKeeper is

BitKeeper is a distributed source management system for version controlling software projects. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 License and supports Windows, macOS, Linux, and self-hosted deployment. The maker describes it as designed for commercial development, including very large projects. BK/Nested divides large repositories into sub-repositories while keeping changesets, libraries, and configuration files aligned with the full code base. The Binary Asset Manager provides local storage for large assets such as videos, photos, artwork, office files, and CAD files. BitKeeper records who changed source, when and from which computer, with comments. Its auto-merge uses the full history to resolve conflicts, according to the maker. The maker also describes checksums and redundant data encoding for detecting and correcting common failures in revision-controlled data. Developers can use graphical tools or the command line; the tutorial says every operation is available through the command line. The download page offers a self-paced sample-repository demo that takes about 30 minutes. Users can clone the last released BitKeeper source with Git. The maker notes that BitKeeper is not the right choice for every project and that Git suits many use cases.