Re: [Monotone-devel] Dump the database in human readable form

[Zack Weinberg]

On 10/17/06, Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> Monotone's raw data structures are basically human-readable, easily
> parseable, chunks of text.  You can pull them out with "automate
> get_revision REVISION-ID", "automate get_manifest_of REVISION-ID",
> "automate get_file FILE-ID", "automate certs REVISION-ID".

For groveling-around-in-the-database purposes, "mtn db exec" is quite
handy, too, particularly if you know that you can do for instance

mtn db exec "select id, gunzip(data) from manifests"

to get the uncompressed version of the "data" column (look in
schema.sql for column names and notes -- this treatment is applicable
to anything marked as "compressed")

However, the automate interface has more stability guarantees attached
to it than the internal database format, so if you can get what you
want that way, do.

[Tangential: are we ever going to want to support different
compression algorithms?]

zw