[Monotone-devel] Cascading Branches

[Peter Simons]

One of the things I maintain in Monotone is my home
directory, mostly the dot-something files to configure
Emacs, Screen, SSH, etc.

My problem, however, is that I have a set of generic files,
which are the same on all machines, but I also have
machine-specific files, like .ssh/authorized_keys -- or
.gnupg/, which should _not_ be checked on just everywhere.

Thus, I ended up having several branches:

    system.home.simons
    system.peti.home.simons
    system.madcow.home.simons

and so on ... Now I "somehow" have to keep those in sync,
because changes in system.home.simons might or might not
have to be propagated to the other branches. In CVS, you
could use modules for this purpose. You could import another
project into yours, so that both would be checked-out
together -- but they remained separate projects, commits
into A had nothing to do with B and vice versa. Or you could
use the "vendor branch" to maintain only differences to some
master-minded repository.

How do I solve this problem in Monotone? I thought
"propagate" might be the answer, but this command really
makes the target _equal_ to the source, it also seems to
affect files in the target, which are local additions in
there. Maybe I made a mistake somewhere and this is all
wrong? I'd be glad to hear!

Anyway, is there a way to simulate a vendor branch in
Monotone? I have been "simulating" modules just by checking
out the other branches in the Makefile, but support from the
program for this would be nice to have.

Oh, and here comes another interesting question: When I
check-out a home directory system.research.home.simons, this
branch cannot include just any file from system.home.simons,
because those files must not go into the database on another
machine! The branch must really just depend on the files it
_contains_, the origins of the branch should not be
necessary to check it out. I'm not sure whether the current
depots are up to that? 

No panic, though. So far, Monotone works great. :-)

Peter