We looked at Monotone last year [LWN.net]

We looked at Monotone last year

Posted Apr 6, 2005 22:13 UTC (Wed) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: Linus on the BK withdrawal by mvirkkil
Parent article: Linus on the BK withdrawal

Monotone has an clever, completely decentralized repository model. This makes it easier to handle large numbers of branches and forks. Plus, Monotone scales relatively well, which isn't always true of products like GNU Arch.

(Subversion scales quite well, except for the networking protocol, which is substantially inferior to CVS for initial checkouts and exports. Fortunately, Subversion doesn't do much networking for updates or commits, so it scales well for common operations.)

Monotone is also written in an usually clean C++ style, which makes it easy to improve.

I evaluated many open source version control tools last year, and I was impressed by Monotone. It's not quite ready for prime time, but it's getting there.

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try darcs -- it only takes a minute

Posted Apr 7, 2005 10:22 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

I use darcs a lot.

It isn't ready for the kernel, but for smaller projects (in terms of number of files, number of patches per day, number of contributors, etc.) it is excellent.

The great thing about darcs is that it takes only a few minutes to try it. Arch/tla is hard to get started with -- I've never managed to get started with arch/tla despite trying a couple of times. But darcs is very easy. In the time it takes you to finish reading this mongo thread on LWN, you could get started with darcs and form your own opinions of it.

http://darcs.net/

Regards,

Zooko

How test VC scalability

Posted Apr 7, 2005 12:42 UTC (Thu) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

Darcs looked cool, but if I recall correctly, it didn't seem sufficiently scalable at the time. But then again, our project at work is huge.

The Monotone developers have a great stress test, which I strongly recommend to other VC developers: the GCC CVS tree. It contains 20,000 files, 90,000 tree versions, and some completely insane number of branches. If you can import this tree, store it in a reasonable amount of disk space, and carry out day-to-day operations in a remotely efficient fashion, you're golden.

There's been this really great renaissance in open source version control lately, and I'm looking forward to future developments.