[Monotone-devel] Re: Cherry-Picking, Renames, Etc.

[graydon hoare]

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> Well, I agree it is, to a great extent, a matter of taste/philosophy. 
> Not using tags is, I agree, much simpler; using them seems (to me) to 
> be much friendlier.

this is possibly true. the difference in our perspective is perhaps that 
I have very little evidence to support the latter claim: nobody else has 
asked for tags, nor mentionned their surprise at the corner case which 
can occur due to lack of tags.

> In YAML we began with a stress on simplicity, but the more users we got, 
> the more we shifted the priority to friendliness.

oh, I'm not opposed to making this trade. but I am aware I'm making it. 
I start with the simple approach because I am lazy, and then listen to 
what real users are saying via bug reports, IRC complaints, etc. (not 
speculative mailing list threads), then reform based on that.

> The most extreme example I know of is Lisp and 
> S-expressions. The simplest, purest, most powerful approach to 
> programming _and_ data representation, and yet hardly anyone uses it, 
> because the code/data is so human-hostile.

heh, this is funny: the argument about lisp usually goes the other way, 
that it is very complicated to implement correctly and hard for users to 
fully understand (do you really know the ins and outs of the MOP, 
compiler macros, gray streams, the loops facility, *and* the condition 
system? not many people do), and that C "won" because it was simpler.

anyways, people do still use lisp. I've been paid to work in it -- even 
recently -- and I know a few other people who still are. it's just a 
minority language now, not an "all signs indicate complete failure" 
language. TCL is alive and well too, despite not being #1. I'm willing 
to accept monotone being one player among many, even a minority player.

> Question: If I start using Monotone now, can I be reasonably certain 
> I'll be able to migrate to newer version as they come along? I need to 
> pick a version control system for a company I'm working on ;-)

reasonably so, yes. I haven't lost data (aside from some half-erroneous 
rename history during the changeset migration, which was quite 
disruptive and hopefully the last major one) since we started 
self-hosting, a year and a half ago. there are several migration-y 
mechanisms built into monotone to deal with minor bumps and adjustments.

that said, the version number is still "0.x", and it is still possible 
that I'll make an incompatible change which is so violent I can't manage 
to make migration techniques. I don't have any plans to, but I'm not 
offering any insurance against it, aside from the usual free software 
mantra: "you can fork if I become too weird".

-graydon