[Monotone-devel] is monotone for me?

[Gour]

Hello!

We plan to start working on Haskell GUI project (qthaskell) soon and
consider about the infrastructure for the project and would like to
clarify some points about Monotone.

My CV in regard to (D)VCS is as follows :

1) started with (basic) usage of CVS which I never grokked.

2) somehow was able to skip SVN and jumped straight to 

3) darcs which I like from the very first day (0.9.7 days).

It fits my mind nicely, not too big command set, powerful features and
one can understand what's going on. Yes, I hit doppleganger bug and
have experience with expon. merge time, but 2.x series fixes (most)
problems.

4) I read a lot and played with hg, but was't impressed to leave
darcs.

5) Had somewhat longer encounter with bzr considering it nice
alternative to bzr. It has, like hg, nice support in 3rd party tools,
nice LP hosting (with email interface to tracker), good multi-platform
support (like hg).

bzr fast-import/export plugin was promising possible 2-way sync with
other tools (I thought to use darcs localy and publish public branches
on LP with bzr.)

Moreover, there are bzr-{git,hg,svn} plugins so one can use only bzr
to fetch from other repos.

6) Here I'm mentioning Git just to make the point that I'm aware of
it, but would rather skip over. Never tried to understand its 'design'
considering it's too hackish and it's not easy, at least for me, to
understand what's going on...It makes the tool unconvenient since one
has to think more about the tool than about the job being afraid to
shot one's own feet, while I believe that (D)VCS should serve my
purpose.

Unfortunately, Git is hyped and lot of projects are just jumping on it
due to general popularity.

7) Recently I also played with Fossil and it is very interesting
system. To me it looks like it took lot from Monotone.

However, along with some other users, I was complaining on the mailing
list about the unfortunate decision of using non-standard wiki which
makes the whole project not suitable for all-in-one solution (DVCS +
wiki + distribute tracker + easy hosting), but the author is fixed in
his decision so we left it.

Yesterday, while chatting on #tailor I was hinted about monotone which
I'm aware about, but, shamefully, never tried to use.

So, we spent some time reading the (very nice) docs (what are you
using for documenting?). I read Concepts & Tutorial fully and skimmed
more quickly through the rest. Now we have some questions in order to
discern whether monotone is the right tool for our needs.

I use DVCS for everything I write - both code & all the texts (mostly
written in markdown/reST) and darcs is serving very nicely.

However, I'm considering alternative  to be used for our Haskell
project...We want robust system which can serve us for many years,
multi-platform support (that's why we abandoned gtk2hs & wxhaskell and
decided to use Qt toolkit.) with possibly some GUI tool for Mac/Win
users/devs not too familiar with cli. (Here darcs is lacking and I've
to evaluate Guitone.)

From reading the docs it is not (too) difficult to conclude that
monotone is very nicely designed system with lot of features and
wonderful security model.

Some considerations we have:

a) what do you find as the reason for not wider acceptance of
monotone? (I know darcs is not too popular as well, but, at least, it
is used widely within Haskell community.) Is there something which is,
according to the public criticism lacking in monotone or it is simply
a fact that "it's too different and not named Xit"?

b) there are some possibilities for hosting darcs repos, but,
according to the wiki, there is only one site offering public hosting
for monotone. Do I miss some?

c) considering b) it seems practical to think about using one's own
hosting for the project, I'm curious about memory requirements on the
server (for medium-sized project)?

(Somehow I missed the docs how one deploys monotone on the server to
provide web browser for the repo - we would like to have public
pullable repo for the public and pushable repo for devs.)

Our project will be open-source and atm I have WebFaction account
which I prefer over VPS leaving me free from botheration of doing
admin work of maintaining mail server, database servers, security
issues etc. 

d) similar to Fossil, monotone is a bit isolated in its own universe
due to the lack of interoperability tools.

Fortunately, I found out about git-export using fast-import mechanism,
but I wonder if there is any plan for git-import to make it easier to
convert from {darcs,git,hg} which support by fast-import/export
mechanism?

I know there is tool named Tailor, but I'd like to hear about any
experience how it works with monotone?

e) I'll try for myself, but let me ask whether Guitone is capable to
replace need for cli for less experienced users?


That's all for now...


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 

Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: F96FF5F6
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