[Monotone-devel] restrictions and SVN type branches/tags?

[Tobias Hunger]

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Hi there!

I've been using monotone for a bit now and just tried to read up on the 
threads in the mailinglist. I found a mail from Derek Scherger about his work 
on restricting monotone commands to subdirectories. I'm really looking 
forward to a version of monotone with these features!

Having said that, I was wondering whether subversion-style branching/tagging 
would be an option with that code. Subversion has no special support for 
those operations but recommends a tree structure like this:
/
+- trunk
+- branches
+- tags

The trunk directory holds the head version (in monotone's case the heads) of 
the sources. To tag a version you just copy the head over into the tag 
directory. Branching is a similar copy operation. Copy of course does not 
duplicate the data but sets up the database "symlinking" to the file/version.

I do like this easy to understand approach a lot (and frankly think that alone 
is worth switching from CVS to subversion!) and would love to see something 
similar in monotone.

Implementing a shallow copy operation for files should not be too hard from 
how I understand monotone? Copying whole trees will be a bit more 
problematic: There is just one manifest which references all files, so the 
first "tag" will double the size of that manifest (it creates one new entry 
per file already in the manifest)! I think one would need to have one 
manifets per directory, each of which mentioning the manifest of all child 
directories to make copying whole trees manageble. Such a change might make 
Derek's subdirectory commands easier, too. On the other hand it will make 
everything else harder. But then tags and branches need some special 
handling, too and that would no longer be necessary.

Well, so far I only used monotone, so feel free to ignore my comments. I do 
not really know what I am talking about and am mostly guessing.

- -- 
Gruss,
Tobias

- ------------------------------------------------------------
Tobias Hunger           The box said: 'Windows 95 or better'
address@hidden                     So I installed Linux.
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