Talk:SourcePuller

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Reverse engineering, or "reverse engineering"?

The article currently says

SourcePuller [...] was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell, who reverse engineered the BitKeeper protocol [...]

This is sourced to an LWN article ([1]) titled "How Tridge reverse engineered BitKeeper". However if you read this (very short) article, then you'll realize that the headline is actually tongue in cheek.

Tridgell merely connected to the BK server, typed in "help", got a short list of commands/explanations that included "clone - clone the current repository", typed "clone", and got the repo data. This isn't "reverse engineering" in any sense even remotely close to the usual sense of the term, contrary to Larry McVoy's claims at the time.

I think Wikipedia should be a bit more careful when reproducing claims by parties with a vested interest (such as McVoy's claim here). And LWN should perhaps be a bit more careful with its headlines, since sarcasm isn't always obvious... but that's for them to fix, not us.

I'll fix the article by attributing the "reverse engineering" claim to McVoy explicitly. Feel free to improve the article further, of course. 188.108.115.31 (talk) 12:05, 11 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]