Re: bkd does not serve html on Windows

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 09:03:33AM -0700, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> Bob Burres wrote:
> 
> >BK/Web is an add on that is only available with the commercial version of
> >BitKeeper.  For the Open Source community we offer bkbits which allows you
> >to provide a web portal to your project.
> 
> When did this policy change? I'm running bk-3.2.3 here (free version), 
> and BK/Web works just fine for me.

I think there is some confusion, let me clear it up.  BK/Web is an
unsupported feature in the free version which is probably why Bob thought
it didn't work.  It really doesn't work under some circumstances, you
have to be running it on a public port that anyone can reach and use
and you have to have not disabled clones/pulls on that port.  In other
words, you can use BK/Web for free but if and only if you are working
100% out in the open.  Otherwise it won't work.

We tend to discourage this use of BK for two reasons:
    - We would prefer you host your source on bkbits.net if you want a 
      public place to host it.  We get some benefit from that, it stresses
      BK more to have lots of data and lots of users, and it is of some
      marketing value as well.
    - While we do our best, we do not claim that BK is free of any security
      problems associated with running a wide open server on a public machine.
      We do audit the code and we do try to make sure that BK is free of 
      security problems but as I am sure you are aware, just because we're
      careful doesn't mean we have caught everything.  If you are running
      BK on a public machine in server mode you are putting yourself more
      at risk to have that machine compromised, that's true for any network
      based server.  We'd much rather have bkbits.net compromised because 
      it is a server with nothing else on it, it's just a cache of source
      in BK.  So if someone broke in the worst thing they can do is delete
      the cache and we have to rebuild it which isn't so bad.  On the 
      other hand if they break into your machine via BK that might be bad.

In general, if there is some reason that you don't want to host your public
repos on bkbits.net please tell us so we can fix it.  It's there for you,
if you have concerns we'll address them. 

Ah, one other thing - bkbits.net runs the commercial version of BK, so it
is faster and has more features.  In particular, you can get traditional
patches out of the BK/Web server so there is an advantage for people who
are running open source projects with a mixed user base.  Some people can
use BK and the people who just want patches can get them easily.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com
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