Katie

About

Katie is a GPL'd revision control system, somewhat like a cross between CVS and NFS. It is inspired by the (expensive, proprietary, but quite nice) Rational (formerly Atria) ClearCase.

The most-cool feature about Katie is that the repository is mounted as a filesystem -- this leads to a few neat things:

• The equivalent of 'cvs checkout' is nearly instantaneous as there is no need to download any files.

• Access to previous versions of files can be done through the filesystem using standard Unix commands. For example, rather than:
  cvs diff -r1.1 -r1.2 myfile
  you can do:
  diff myfile@@/main/[12]
  or:
  diff myfile@@/main/3 myfile@@/main/LATEST
  ('myfile@@' is a hidden directory containing the entire revision history of 'myfile').

Another nice feature is that directories are versioned just like regular files, so if you delete a file, you can go back and see it just by looking at a previous version of the directory (again, through the filesystem, no new commands are needed).

Status

Katie is currently in a rather pre-alpha state. The functionality that has been implemented so far (checkin, checkout, labels, branches, dynamic views, configuration specifications, comments) works very nicely, but there is much still to do. See doc/TODO in the distribution for details of what needs to be done, and doc/QUICKSTART for an introduction to what is currently working.

License

Katie is licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is written and copyrighted by Geoffrey D. Bennett.

Mailing Lists

Katie has two mailing lists; katie-devel and katie-announce.

katie-devel is intended for discussions about the development of Katie -- please subscribe if you would like to participate in its development or if you have any questions or comments about Katie.

katie-announce is a read-only list that will be only used for announcements about Katie (such as new releases) -- please subscribe if you want to be informed about these.

Note that if you are subscribed to the katie-devel list, you most likely want to subscribe to katie-announce as well.

When katie becomes useful for normal people, I'll create a katie-users list too :-).

Download and Requirements

I would like to get feedback on what I have currently done, so you are encouraged to download Katie, try it out, subscribe to the mailing lists, and send in your comments.

To make it work, you will need:

• Linux (it should work on FreeBSD, it might work on other Unixes, but I haven't tried)
• PostgreSQL (developed with 7.1; 7.2 and 7.3 should work, 7.0 will probably work, but 6.5.3 won't)
• Perl, including a working suidperl (developed with 5.6; I don't know if it will work with 5.005)
• Inline.pm 0.42 or 0.43
• Parse-RecDescent (Inline.pm needs this)
• Storable.pm
• GCC
• Probably other things I don't know about or have forgotten

If you can't get Katie to work (after following the instructions in the README :-), please subscribe to katie-devel, and I will try to assist.