[Monotone-devel] Future of monotone

[Thomas Keller]

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*).
But even if Qt is not your personal favourite, what about bringing the 
started Eclipse integration project mtteam forward? What about a 
Tortoise-alike Windows plugin? What about a native OSX-Finder extension? 
(I could even team up with somebody for the last thing, but I would have 
to get started with Obj-C first, still I'm very interested in that.) Of 
course the automation interface has not yet everything available what 
would be needed there, but this is nothing what should stop us there.
  If we're able to attract more users through better frontend / 
integration support I have the strong belief that we're also able to 
acquire new people which actually want to hack on monotone's core and 
which are able to bring back the development pace we had a couple of 
months ago.

Now I have no idea what will happen on the planned monotone summit in 
April/May - I seriously hope that it will happen at all because only six 
people have yet decided to come along (*wink*). And I also hope that 
we're able to at least start on some of the outstanding issues and maybe 
team up in certain areas.

Hope to see you in April!

Thomas.

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