[Monotone-devel] One-step checkouts?

[Eric Kidd]

Many thanks to all the Monotone developers for such a cool program! I
hope you won't mind if venture a tiny suggestion.

Monotone makes me very happy, once I get it running.  But it could
make a better first impression if the initial checkout sequence were
shorter, and defaulted a bit better.

Checking out the monotone tree currently requires three steps:

  $ monotone --db=monotone.db db init
  $ monotone --db=monotone.db --key="" pull venge.net net.venge.monotone
  $ monotone --db=monotone.db --branch=net.venge.monotone co monotone

Anonymous CVS checkouts take two steps, login and checkout.  But SVN
does a particularly nice job of this:

  $ svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kjs

This produces a local directory named kjs/ containing exactly the source I need.

Is it desirable to have a short "initial checkout" sequence?  And if
so, do people have any thoughts about what syntax to use?

Cheers,
Eric