Re: [Monotone-devel] monotone evaluation in commercial project [long]

[rghetta]

Derek Scherger wrote:
> rghetta wrote:
>
> > Monotone situation seems somewhat comparable, because even a simple
> > "what errors were corrected this week" requires the same process,
> > despite having a SQL engine underneath.
>
> depends on how you expect the vcs to answer than question. if all you're 
> looking for is changelog entries with some claim that bug #such-and-such 
> is fixed then you should be fine. monotone also has testresult certs and 
> if you had some testing authority that was running a testsuite and 
> certifying what passed/failed you could query these certs as well, so 
> perhaps it will do what you're looking for?

Yes, I was referring to commit comments, but this applies also to 
testcerts (or any other custom cert, for that matter).
Perhaps the question could be better rephrased as "which changeset were 
commited this week?".
The real problem is getting that information out of monotone without 
having to parse unformatted data.
At the sql level this is trivial, but the cert value is encoded, as you 
pointed out.
Besides, if I understand correctly monotone operation, the database 
could contain "untrusted" revisions, and only by checking keys and 
certificates you can filter them out.
IMHO, this pretty much rules out direct database access, leaving only 
the monotone standard commands.
But with these even getting the changeset commited this week is not 
easy: I haven't found a way to get it other than the log command, and 
that not that easy to parse and requires a working copy (why ?)
Besides, I was unable to obtain a log starting point using a date 
selector (probably my mistake) and anyway you can limit on the number of 
entries, not on the date/author/whatever.
Any other listing command requires a single id, and thus is unusable.
You can use the automation interface, but that's not easy either: it 
understands only hex selectors and its output can't be restricted.
Perhaps I'm just thick, but how can I get the list of changeset beetween 
two dates ?

While having all the listing command understand a range could answer 
this simple case, more advanced queries aren't that simple.  As an 
example: "Which files were changed more than 25 times last month ?" or 
"What's the mean time beetween successive changes of a file ?" or even 
"Who's the most/least prolific committer ?"
I do not see a way to answer these questions without parsing the entire 
history and dumping into another database for queries.
Obviously monotone is a SCM, not a reporting tool, but most of the 
informations needed to answer these questions are already in sqlite 
tables as columns (ok, file informations are not), thus seems such a 
waste not having some form of querying interface.

A partial solution would be a command to make the exporting process 
easier and faster by defining a standard exchange format and limiting 
the scope of output.
Perhaps we could also directly export to a "reporting" sqlite database, 
by flattening *on export* the internal monotone structure to one better 
suited to reports.

Thanks for reading all this. Next post will be shorter, I promise :-)

Greetings,
        Riccardo