[Monotone-devel] Re: YANQ (yet another newbie question)

[Bruce Stephens]

"Ken MacDonald" <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> I wasn't planning to create a nested set of workspaces (though I did
> that by accident once a few days ago when I first started playing
> with mtn; good idea to avoid that!). Just a main directory to house
> the project, and then a number of workspaces positioned below the
> main directory.

Nothing wrong with that, necessarily.  You should realise that
monotone has no special support for this setup, though.

GNU Arch does, and mercurial has a "forest" extension, and subversion
and CVS tend to work OK.

Specifically, if you issue "mtn update" from your top-level directory,
that won't affect any of the nested ones, and similarly "mtn commit",
"mtn diff", etc., will ignore the nested workspaces.  "mtn ls ignored"
and "mtn ls unknown" are likely to produce confusing output.

Monotone (like most of the newer systems) is intended to version a
directory tree all in one revision.

There are cases where what you're doing might still make sense, IMHO.
Where the nested workspaces are of external projects, which might have
different branching policies, etc.

IMHO then it can make sense to split things in this sort of way.  But
you don't get much help from monotone when you do that, though mostly
things work OK.  (I didn't find GNU Arch's support that useful; I've
not used mercurial much, and not the forest extension even then.)

[...]