[Monotone-devel] usage question

[Arthur A. Gleckler]

I have a question that is a user's question, not a Monotone  
developer's question.  I apologize in advance if this list isn't the  
appropriate place.  Please let me know if it isn't.

I've been using Monotone for about a year for personal projects, but  
only in the most trivial way -- by myself and on only one machine.   
Inspired by an excellent talk at Google last week by Nathaniel Smith,  
I'm hoping to use it for more complicated projects.  To start with, I  
want to use it to merge different copies of my twenty-three years of  
accumulated Emacs configuration files.  I have copies of this tree on  
different computers and want to merge them and keep them in sync from  
now on.

Because all of my files have existed since before I started using  
Monotone, I have multiple versions of the same file.  I couldn't find  
anything in the manual about what happens if I check the same file  
into two different databases, then sync them and try to merge.  I  
tried an experiment with a branch containing only one file (but two  
versions).  The sync of the two databases went fine, but <mtn merge>  
gave this error:

  mtn: 2 heads on branch 'com.speechcode.test'
  mtn: [left]  b54113a3350992e615a5e56bd3e435c95c641b3e
  mtn: [right] ccfa379b24f9bbc63629ce0dbebe1e8d0e0b0941
  mtn: warning: rename target conflict: nodes 3, 1, both want parent  
0, name
  mtn: warning: resolve non-content conflicts and then try again.
  mtn: error: merge failed due to unresolved conflicts

What's the right way to proceed here?  Is there a way to have  
Monotone prompt me to merge just the files that don't match, running  
a manual merge tool as necessary?  Is there any problem starting with  
two versions of a file that don't, in fact, have a common ancestor in  
Monotone?

I'm not on <monotone-devel> (yet), so please include me in To or CC  
on any replies.

Thanks very much for all your help, and thank you for Monotone, too.   
It's so nice to use a practical open source version control system  
with an excellent theoretical basis.