Re: [Monotone-devel] Future of monotone

[Peter Todd]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 02:41:37PM +0100, Thomas Keller wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> You've probably read Graydons recent message; I did and I have to say 
> that it made me a little sad. Not because Graydon "officially" stopped 
> working on the project - he wasn't doing many things lately anyways 
> beside the recent attempt of redoing netsync with something smarter in 
> nvm.nuskool (Whats the status of this Graydon? Do you think it is worth 
> that somebody else picks up your work there?) - but more that he spoke 
> out what a couple of other core developers could also have on their 
> minds. I might be completly wrong and you're up to prove me wrong, but 
> still, we all know that there was not much progress over the last months.
> 
> There are still quite a lot dedicated people who care about this 
> software (put yourself on the list if you read this with a tear in your 
> eye) and I'm sure all these people don't want to let this software die 
> silently. On the other hand it seems that there are not *enough* of us 
> which have actually enough spare time, knowledge and/or steady interest 
> to bring this project really forward.
> 
> So where lacks monotone the most? In my humble opinion its probably 
> integration and graphical frontends. If a project or company is 
> evaluating distributed version control systems, frontends and 
> integration are two important factors, and lets face it, there is 
> nothing in production-state ready at the moment (if somebody lends me a 
> helping hand with guitone, we could get something ready faster, of 
> course... *wink*).

I'll just say I've been using monotone for almost a year now for all the
work I do. I don't do any collaborative work, so of course my experience
doesn't make maximal usage of monotone's features, but as someone who
works in a Linux environment I'll say that monotone is perfect for what
I do. Still issues that can be fixed of course, I gotta get monotone
ported to debian etch for instance, and I'd love to see someone make
some more sensible merge conflict error messages.

I've been playing around with ViewMTN recently, see my installation at
http://petertodd.org/mtn/ and have been integrating it with my website.
So for instance in my UUID pages for my artworks the revision numbers go
directly to the associated revision. Here's a good example:
http://petertodd.org/uuid/7cf63b08442143f5/

You're right of course, the ability to easilly do stuff like that, have
to have it done already, is a major driver in adoption. ViewMTN
impressed me, although it seemed to have a lot of rough edges and
sometimes crashes.

FWIW I'm planning to seperate out the mtn automate code from ViewMTN and
create a nice python library to generalize mtn actions. For instance in
my website the source code page, http://petertodd.org/art/source-code/
should be generated by querying my mtn database. But without nice
libraries, that's not easy to do.


Anyway, just thought you might appreciate the thoughts of an everyday
monotone user. It's great software and I'd hate to see it stagnate.

-- 
http://petertodd.org

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