Re: [Monotone-devel] Questions about Monotone

[Markus Wanner]

Hi,

Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Anyways, at this point I would like to commit the changes related to
> Issue_B. But I already have a bunch of changes for Feature_A and I don't
> want to mix the two together. These are logically different changes and
> should be on different patches. I would like to know how Monotone could
> help me deal with this situation. This situation happens every week. I
> am often working on improving the crappy source code I inherited from my
> predecessor or fixing security issues while the boss wants to add a new
> feature. So I need a simple way to say "put these changes in the patch
> but don't include these other ones".

I consider this a standard feature of pretty much ever VCS, including
even CVS: you simply tell it which files to commit, no?

> My current solution is Darcs, which indeed makes the above easy. When I
> run "darcs record", darcs shows me the changes one at a time, and I can
> tell it which ones to include in the patch. Another equally good
> solution is: (1) record the current changes for Feature_A, (2) work on
> Issue_B, (3) record the changes for Issue_B, (4) UN-DO step (1), and
> continue working on Feature_A. This latter option is actually more useful.

Ah, so you are talking about changes within the same file. Well, yeah,
that's an area where monotone isn't that brilliant, yet.

One way to do it would be to use a branch for Feature_A, commit your
experimental changes there and then switch back to the main / stable
branch for Issue_B. As long as the changes don't conflict, the merge
algorithm does everything for you. Remember that branches are cheap.

Another way is to split logically different modules into different
files, which is advisable anyway, IMO.

Regards

Markus Wanner