[Monotone-devel] version control comparison

[Thomas Keller]

Hi!

I've noticed on http://www.versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/ that
monotone is listed, but unfortunately a few information are wrong or
missing there. Would you mind and correct them?

(Source: http://www.versioncontrolblog.com/comparison/Monotone/index.html)

"Intelligent Merging after Moves or Renames"

Fully supported. One of monotone's huge strengths is the explicit and
correct tracking of file names by internal node ids, so regardless how
you move or rename a file between two development lines, a later merge
will always do the right thing (tm).

"File and Directories Copies"

Actually, "tracked" copies are currently not supported, i.e. monotone
does not track information about copied files. Copy support is in the
work for some time now (as well as support for sutures), but not yet
released.

"Repository Permissions"

Current monotone has specific read permissions with which you can
control the access to certain parts (aka branch patterns) for known user
ids, but less specific write permissions. Basically, if a user is
allowed to write to a server, it can write everything there pretty much
unrestricted. We're aware that this is problematic for a couple of
reasons and we're working on a solution. Our mailing list and wiki
contains a couple of theoretical stuff how we plan to implement it
("policy branches") and there is a basic implementation in an
experimental branch, but its not yet finished.

"Tracking Line-wise File History"

We're on 0.41 now, I guess you can remove the comment "since 0.19",
which was released more than three years ago ;)

"Per-File Commit Messages"

Its possible with so-called attributes to attach any kind of information
to a single node (file or directory), however these attributes become
part of the changeset and thus the revision. So changing things later on
leads to new revisions obviously. One can, however, attach certificates
at a later stage to any committed revision. Default certificates for a
revision include the date, author, changelog and branch certificate.

"Documentation"

The man page has been removed, but the excellent documentation is still
available in PDF and HTML format and the command line client provides
easy and grouped access to all available commands.

"Web interface"

There is ViewMTN (http://viewmtn.angrygoats.net/) and a Trac plugin
(http://tracmtn.1erlei.de/) available.

"Availability of Graphical User-Interfaces."

There are a couple of GUIs available, f.e. monotone-viz
(http://oandrieu.nerim.net/monotone-viz/), an excellent repository
browser, guitone (http://guitone.thomaskeller.biz), which can handle
repositories as well as workspaces, and a relatively new Perl/GTK2-based
frontend named mtn-browse (currently its only available in the
repository under
http://viewmtn.angrygoats.net/all/branch/changes/net.venge.monotone.contrib.mtn-browse)

A complete list of tools is available under
http://monotone.ca/wiki/InterfacesFrontendsAndTools/


Thanks in advance,
Thomas.

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