Re: [Monotone-devel] Status of blue sky ideas?

[Bruce Stephens]

CooSoft Support <address@hidden> writes:

> Bruce Stephens wrote:

[...]

> I was thinking about divergences from non-head revisions, in mtn you
> just get two heads on the same branch. In git it goes off branch and
> the only way you can get back to it is to remember the sha1 hash on
> the revision. If it isn't put on a branch then it gets pruned when you
> do a git gc.. Other things are also more clunky.

Technically not true, but I take your point.  It can certainly be
non-trivial to find work that you just know you committed.  Not
(ordinarily) impractical.  The user manual has a section on it
("Recovering lost changes").

[...]

> hehe - a lot of people do not get on with git, goodness knows how many
> do.

Certainly true.  And mercurial seems quite attractive to many: it's
similarly fast and space-efficient but with a saner command set.

> mtn is very good at the day to day stuff, branching merging etc
> and the merging on git can make a real mess - I know I have had to
> sort  it out (and yes mtn under the same conditions did it perfectly).

Could be.  I've not noticed any particular problems: for me git's
merging has been adequate, really fast, and the rerere support allows it
to cope with repeated similar merges (admittedly that seems quite hacky,
but it works OK).  Quite possibly I'm just used to the pain.

What I'm not sure is, given that someone finds the git commands
confusing (which isn't difficult to believe) and doesn't like mercurial,
how plausible the monotone story is.

I think I'd look at bazaar and fossil next (not sure in what order).
fossil also uses sqlite (is originally written by the author of sqlite)
and gives a wiki, bug tracker, web interface as well as a DVCS.