The GNOME DVCS survey [LWN.net]

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 5, 2009 23:11 UTC (Mon) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link]

Monotone is used by very few projects these days. It had a pioneering design, but several implementation and interface problems that made it not very suitable for doing real work (the fact that Git is easier to use than Monotone, at least the last time I tried it, says a lot).

Here is the currently listed set of steps for checking out the Monotone source code:

$ mtn --db=mtn.db db init
$ mtn --db=mtn.db pull monotone.ca "net.venge.monotone*"
$ mtn --db=mtn.db checkout -r t:monotone-0.28 monotone

Compared to the steps for Git, Hg, and Bzr:

$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg mercurial-repo
$ bzr branch http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev bzr.dev

Add on the fact that the data format changes on each release and thus requires a migration, that it's fairly slow, and it just isn't really competitive with the other options these days.

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 5, 2009 23:48 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

>Compared to the steps for Git

Well, if you do it with git's plumbing, it is similarly hard:

$ git init $ git remote add origin git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git $ git fetch remote $ git reset --hard origin/HEAD $ git config branch.master.remote origin $ git config branch.master.merge master

It looks that mtn is still much of the plumbing tool that git once was, so at least give it some slack when doing comparisons :-)

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 6, 2009 1:39 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Unless monotone offers a simple command to do the equivalent of the three commands given, the criticism stands. It is also possible to expand the "bzr branch" command into multiple steps, but people would very rarely do that.

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 8, 2009 10:23 UTC (Thu) by vivi48 (subscriber, #6412) [Link]

it does ...

mtn clone monotone.ca net.venge.monotone

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 6, 2009 1:59 UTC (Tue) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link]

Yes, but Monotone has been around for several years longer than Git. Git was in fact inspired by the
design of Monotone, but implemented to be much more efficient and to work better as a plumbing
system that you could wrap porcelain around. Monotone is a big monolithic blob of C++, so it's
fairly difficult to link to, and only around the time that Git was being developed did Monotone start
addding a scripting interface with a standardized, parseable output format. And even still, there
doesn't appear to be very good porcelain around it, while Git's design has meant that more
porcelain has been written more quickly.

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 6, 2009 6:18 UTC (Tue) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]

sorry, can't resist...

http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/ -- the last para but one is always worth a look :-)

The GNOME DVCS survey

Posted Jan 6, 2009 0:11 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Elijah didn't ask about anything, this is an analysis of survey data that was released by the GNOME project.

My suspicion is that if GNOME is like most other large (and particularly Free Software) projects, it's already using Git. Developers who like Git will take arbitrary source code or other data and suck it into Git because it makes their life easier. So formally moving the project to Git would just mean putting the rubber stamp on the paperwork (and saving a lot of people huge swathes of disk space).

Of course moving the /whole project/ is a good deal (and probably months of work) different from a few individual developers choosing to use Git. But unlike with earlier non-distributed version control systems the DVCS revolution is itself distributed. If GNOME makes no decision the number of people using Git to contribute will climb anyway.