Re: [Monotone-devel] [from svn list] Case study: Mono switches to Subversion

[Jon Bright]

Derek Scherger wrote:
> Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
>
> > Considering the stubornness of some people in the GNOME project (as I
> > understand it from the message you point at), monotone would probably
> > not go at all, primarly because there's no 'blame'/'annotate' and
>
>
> graydon seems to consider annotate somewhat important:
>
>     http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=7896

It's not just the Mono people to whom it's important, either: I use 
annotate at least 3 or 4 times each week.  Generally, I'm looking at a 
bug.  Since each of the people in our (small) team has probably touched 
every part of the code at some time or other, if I find something that 
seems wrong, or that I don't understand, I do an annotate - I'll then 
usually:

1. Look at the diff for that revision, to see what changed along with 
that line, and also to make sure that annotate's not showing me some 
indentation change or so.
2. Look at the log message to see if there's clarification
3. Speak to the person involved to see if I'm misunderstanding, or if 
this is actually a bug.

Another use case would be: I suspect a particular function of producing 
a bug.  I know the bug started happening in the last 2 weeks - I do an 
annotate and can easily see when the last changes to that function 
occurred, thereby either excluding the function as a cause of problems, 
or quickly confirming that it's worthy of further examination.

In other words, annotate's really, really useful for me, even though 
working in a small team.  I'm happy if other people don't use it - other 
people don't use XEmacs either, and it doesn't keep me awake at night, 
but for those people who do, it's an almost indispensible tool.

(I'm not arguing against you, just mentioning as an aside why imho, it's 
really important to add annotate at some point)

--
Jon Bright
Silicon Circus Ltd.
http://www.siliconcircus.com