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Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone
From: |
Ethan Blanton |
Subject: |
Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone |
Date: |
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:17:54 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) |
Thomas Keller spake unto us the following wisdom:
> There are still quite a lot dedicated people who care about this
> software (put yourself on the list if you read this with a tear in your
> eye) and I'm sure all these people don't want to let this software die
> silently. On the other hand it seems that there are not *enough* of us
> which have actually enough spare time, knowledge and/or steady interest
> to bring this project really forward.
I certainly am still pinning my DVCS hopes and dreams on monotone;
it's come a long way since I first started paying attention.
> So where lacks monotone the most?
Speaking from the point of view of a Pidgin developer, which I think
puts me in the minority of actually using monotone for a project of
nontrivial size and activity (OpenEmbedded is the other example I see
come up a lot), my primary concerns are:
1) Occasional UI glitches (which are rapidly being ironed out), where
long and laborious activities (such as manual merges) are aborted
due to checkable pre-conditions failing after the fact. I am not
aware of any *specific* instances of this right now, but there have
been quite a few, and doubtless will be more. Fortunately, they're
fixed pretty much as they're found.
2) Speed of common operations such as 'annotate', 'diff', various 'ls'
options. These have improved greatly with, e.g., heights, but
still leave much to be desired.
3) Speed of netsync. This possibly should be #1. Pulling pidgin from
pidgin.im is basically an hour-long process. Not only is it so
slow that most casual developers give up (many have even told us
this), but it's hard on the server.
4) Locking troubles. We have to solve a LOT of problems with netsync
to the public server, even on localhost, because multiple monotone
processes do not share one database well. This wouldn't be as
painful if (as previously mentioned) netsync were not so expensive.
5) Workspace merge. This was started, but never finished.
3-way-merge tools are all well and good, but sometimes the Right
Answer is just a developer in an editor. I see a lot of grumbling
about this on our chat channels and mailing list. Extremely large
merges are particularly annoying, because they have to be handled
in monotone's preferred order, the context around changes is hard
to find (e.g., you don't know what another, successfully
auto-merged file looks like, because you can't reference the
merge-in-progress until it's done), and they have to be completed
all in one shot without any failures.
6) Occasional bad merge glitches. We've seen lines deleted which we
could not justify, hunks added or missing, etc. I've discussed a
couple of these on IRC, but they generally boil down to such long
merge chains that it's hard to debug as an outsider, and monotone
regulars face a huge cost in setting up and trolling through
Pidgin's 250MB revision database.
As bad as all this sounds, I think we're generally pretty happy. :-)
I'm certainly sorry to see Graydon throw in the towel, but I'm
grateful for his work on monotone, and the work of all the subsequent
developers who have brought us to this point.
Ethan
--
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws [that have no remedy
for evils]. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.
-- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764
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- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, (continued)
Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone,
Ethan Blanton <=
Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, Jack Lloyd, 2008/01/28
- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, Timothy Brownawell, 2008/01/28
- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, Jack Lloyd, 2008/01/28
- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, hendrik, 2008/01/28
- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, Patrick Georgi, 2008/01/29
- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, Nathaniel Smith, 2008/01/29
- Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone, Nuno Lucas, 2008/01/29
[Monotone-devel] Re: Future of monotone, Boris, 2008/01/31