Re: [Monotone-devel] [RFC] M.T. phone home

[Marcel van der Boom]

On 8 jun 2006, at 11:29, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> It's also not clear to me how this would work; if people aren't
> pushing their code, why would they be pushing their logging info?
Admitted, this is also not 100% clear to me. Mentality perhaps.

If you grok the whole revision tree concept and how monotone can deal  
with it, no reason. There are plenty of mechanisms available in  
monotone to use, but with one pretty big condition: "you have to dive  
in yourself as a user" In many groups, where a big part of the  
developer population just follows suit and says: "ok, monotone it is"  
implements a minimal environment to get their stuff done, but doesnt  
go much further than that.

Some things which may play a part here:
* the "pushing is final" thought, whatever gets pushed, must be ok,  
so "not done" equals "not pushing yet", which is of course fine, but  
the few who *do* dive into monotone usually end up doing the merge  
work and resolve whatever is duplicated in parallell efforts (yeah, i  
know this is a group organisation problem really, just braining)
* multiple heads are scary; or perhaps confusing
* try to explain the procedure for dealing with 'orphaned nodes' or,  
in general, committing a child revision at a random place in the tree  
to reach a certain goal. Usual response: huh? (could be my  
explanation of course)
* general random snippet of questions i get:
    > joe: $mtn pull some.host 'some.branch'
    > joe: mtn: misuse: no database specified
    > joe: Now what?


> But
> monotone works hard to make pushing code orthogonal to project-level
> decisions like that, so pushing code and pushing logging are pretty
> much the same.)
True, and that orthogonality is perfect for those who dive, since it  
provides options and as an effect: trust in the tool. Finding the  
balance where 'divers' are comfortable and dont suffer too much from  
'non-divers' without having stuff to make things easier for them (not  
because the 'divers' want to, but out of self-protection)

Perhaps i'm just doing a lousy job teaching people to dive. :-)
Anyways, just some thoughts.

marcel
--
Marcel van der Boom
HS-Development BV               --   http://www.hsdev.com
So! webapplicatie framework  --   http://make-it-so.info

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