Re: [Monotone-devel] results of mercurial user survey

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 02:45:53PM +0200, Georg-W. Koltermann wrote:
> Hg really appeals to me.  Picking Hg or monotone mainly becomes a matter
> of your preference for either a more star-like topology with a couple of
> oligarchic interconnected repositories keeping all the history (well, to
> the extent of their inter-netsyncing), or a fully p2p topology with all
> the flexibility but also all the anarchy that it allows.  Basically with
> the full p2p topology it is very easy to loose track of where your
> history is and where it isn't.  And then suddenly when you remove one of

I'm not sure I'd phrase it as "star topology" versus "p2p topology".
At the communication level, both monotone and hg allow totally
arbitrary (p2p?) communication flows.

> the peers you may easily loose a part of your history.  Which may be a
> good thing if you were careful to merge the parts of history that you
> want to keep to somewhere else beforehand, and thus you only loose the
> parts that were more like sandboxish experimentation.  But it really
> depends, you might as well loose valuable history if your merge flow was
> not rigorous enough.

But, exactly, your idea is right on.  Monotone uses fully
decentralized _mechanics_ to implement a centralized "working model",
with shared branches and everything -- two people can still be working
on "the same branch" even if they're disconnected.  We replaced the
centralized server with one of those amorphous clouds you see in
networking diagrams ("Here Be Internet"), but conceptually things
don't really change that much.

Hg (and darcs, git, bzr, bk, arch, ...), in contrast, are not just
decentralized but "scattered".  I tend to visualize project history
in their models as a bunch of little points with empty space between
them, lying all over the world, and the full project history is the
assemblage of them all together.

We don't really have any idea yet which model is better, or how that
depends on the user in question -- though different people will have
different guesses.  Since monotone is the only one even trying its
approach, though, I feel like we owe the idea our labor, to give it a
fair chance at life :-).

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Damn the Solar System.  Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with
comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better one myself.
  -- Lord Jeffrey