[Monotone-devel] Running Monotone as a personal VCS

[Paul Moore]

Hi,
I apologise if this isn't the right place to post this - it's more of
a user question than a developer one, but I couldn't find a user
mailing list.

I want to start using a VCS for my personal projects. I have
previously tried Subversion, but my working habits are such that it's
a bit of a pain - I work at a number of locations, and don't have
access to a suitable central server from them all. I also work on
occasion completely disconnected from the network, so the more I can
do without server access the better.

In many ways, I'm acting as a distributed development environment
(albeit with only one developer :-)) so I wondered whether a
distributed VCS would suit me better.

Looking at Monotone, it seems to suit what I'm after, but there's one
question I can't find an answer to. My ISP provides me with a static
web space, with access to upload files via FTP. This is the only
shared file space I have (short of portable solutions like USB keys).
My question is, can I host a copy of my Monotone database on that
server, in any useful form? Obviously, I can't host a full repository,
as I can't run the server there, but can I copy my local repository to
and from my current PC, and use the copy?

I'm thinking of an approach something like this:

On PC #1:

(Initial setup)
Create database
Do some work, commit it.
Copy the DB to my ISP filespace.

On PC #2:

(Initial setup on this PC)
Copy the DB from my ISP
Pull work into a local workspace, make changes, commit.
Copy the DB back to my ISP.

> From now on, on either PC, before and after I do any work, I copy the
DB from the ISP to a local temporary file, sync with the local DB,
then copy the DB back to the ISP. This way, I always have an up to
date DB at the ISP. If I forget, have to finish quickly and don't have
time to resync, or I'm working offline, I just work on the local DB,
and have a bit more to sync at the next merge.

Does this approach sound feasible? If it will work at all, I can give
it a go and get a feel for whether it's too clumsy to be practical,
but I don't want to waste too much time setting up something that will
never actually work in practice...

Thanks in advance,
Paul.