[Monotone-devel] Re: Would you declare monotone ready for production use?

[graydon hoare]

On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 12:43:52 +0200, Andreas Känner <address@hidden> wrote:

> is monotone ready for production use or should I wait a little bit longer?
> Its version number suggests, that it is in its early stages and I wonder
> which features are missing before version 1.0 is ready.

it seems to work reasonably well, but there are some important
caveats at the moment:

 - there is a file size limitation: 16mb per file stored. it
   cannot store larger files than that. this will go away when
   sqlite 3 is released and we switch to it.

 - there is a slightly lossy format change coming up when
   I merge the "changeset" branch into the main one. this will
   possibly lose some details of history. I try to make migration
   functions but it's not clear to me that it'll be possible in
   this case. a fundamental historical representation is changing.

 - the changeset branch fixes a number of design problems which do
   not *usually* bite people, but have been known to. mostly to do
   with broken renaming logic and circular history.

 - there are a number of UI things missing at the moment.
   blame/annotate, diff and history on single files, commits to
   single files, etc. we have plans to fix all of these, but they
   are not yet all done.

 - there are merge scenarios (conflicting tree-layout changes)
   which it currently has no strategy for resolving. these can
   cause merging to block until you manually guess at the problem
   and un-wedge it by committing a new head.

overall, I would not recommend depending solely on monotone yet
for a serious development effort, but I'd say it's fairly safe if
your users are tolerant of young software and you don't mind doing
the occasional bit of legwork. I don't think it'll lose data or
trash your system or anything. I've never had it lose data, in
over a year of self-hosting. even if you did have a fault, the
amount of replication makes permanent losses quite unlikely.

-graydon