[Monotone-devel] Re: Future of monotone

[Boris]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:41:37 +0200, Thomas Keller <address@hidden>  
wrote:

> [...]So where lacks monotone the most? In my humble opinion its probably

Hi there,

I've been introducing monotone to some commercial software projects about  
one year ago. I don't know how many use monotone to maintain commercial  
software but the things I miss most are these:

* I need a kind of project branch to put several projects into the same  
monotone database. I want everyone to be free to create new branches but I  
don't want everyone to be so free that branches which are actually  
different projects are mixed up. Putting every project into its own  
database would be possible but is too much work (eg. it requires some team  
members who work on several projects to synchronize several databases all  
day).

* I also need something which I think is called policy branch here. I need  
to set read-/write-permissions per project/branch. And these permissions  
should be saved in the database and not in text files. The idea that  
developers can synchronize their databases directly is great (eg. I had  
setup a central monotone server which is moved to a new data center and is  
now offline for too long). However it doesn't help if everyone has to set  
permissions first. Even worse if they don't do it developers might get  
access to projects/branches they should not have access to.

The #1 reason why I introduced monotone at all (apart from the fact that  
it is a distributed version control system) is that it is really very easy  
to setup and use. No need to rely on and wait for system administrators -  
developers are in full control of the whole system. The cost-efficiency  
ratio is really good!

If it comes to GUIs I can imagine a kind of Windows shell extension which  
could be used by managers to synchronize a folder with a monotone server  
directly. While developers are in full control the problem is that  
everyone else is not. I could imagine a shell extension which is installed  
by managers. Then I send a .reg file to them which will add some entries  
to their Windows registry (like name of the server to synchronize with  
etc.). And then they are ready to go and see what their developers are  
actually doing all day. If it was possible to develop shell extensions in  
.NET I would have tried that quickly. But as Microsoft doesn't recommend  
it I didn't have any time yet to come up with some C++ code.

Boris