[Monotone-devel] Re: Cherry-Picking, Renames, Etc.

[Oren Ben-Kiki]

On Monday 29 November 2004 02:28, graydon hoare wrote:
> Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:
> >     If you have a good 3-way merge, you can "cherry-pick"
> > *anything*.
>
> yeah. this is what we all seem to be settling on (and afaik already
> have a command to sort-of do.. more soon). we all agree this is a
> workable idea in theory. we have to give it a shot in practise before
> getting too happy about it though :)

Hurray! (getting too happy here :-)

> > [uid tags]
>
> <philosophy>
> a lot of this is just trading conceptual simplicity for features. my
> work on monotone comes down on the side of simplicity somewhat more
> often than some people want, but it's *usually* intentional. in any
> case, it's good to talk things over to make sure.
> </philosophy>

Well, I agree it is, to a great extent, a matter of taste/philosophy. 
Not using tags is, I agree, much simpler; using them seems (to me) to 
be much friendlier.

In YAML we began with a stress on simplicity, but the more users we got, 
the more we shifted the priority to friendliness. What we got now isn't 
that simple (it isn't _that_ complicated either), but it is very 
friendly. I think we made the right choice; systems were designed to be 
used by people, being "pure" and "elegant" carries little weight in the 
real world. The most extreme example I know of is Lisp and 
S-expressions. The simplest, purest, most powerful approach to 
programming _and_ data representation, and yet hardly anyone uses it, 
because the code/data is so human-hostile.

So. This is a taste issue, and it is your project, so I won't keep 
bugging you about it. I'm (all too) happy to hear you'll be doing the 
3-way merge based "cherry-picking" feature, and I'd be even happier if 
you used something like the graphical notation that I proposed (these 
things really should be visible in the graph). All in all, I'm a happy 
camper.

Question: If I start using Monotone now, can I be reasonably certain 
I'll be able to migrate to newer version as they come along? I need to 
pick a version control system for a company I'm working on ;-)

Have fun,

 Oren Ben-Kiki