Re: [Monotone-devel] Setting up syncs & read/write permissions on Windows

[Ken MacDonald]

> Well, the thing is that Windows users in general have no real knowledge
> what a "home directory" is and where it is located at all.

Probably from the day when these boxes only ran MS-DOS; who needed a
home dir if you only have 1 user?

But monotone apparently figures it out for you "on the fly". The first
day I followed a bit of the tutorial (on my windows box) I entered the
command as described in the tutorial:

mtn db init --db=~/beth.mtn

which is not a valid pathname in native windows-speak.

mtn apparently either guessed (or obtained from a windows service)
that I really meant:

mtn db init --db="C:\Documents and Settings\<username>.<WORKGROUP>\beth.mtn"

because that's what it did. It would be useful if it *told* me
somewhere where I should expect things to be created on Windows,
either as output from the "mtn db init..." command, or in the doc
somewhere. Or both.

> tries to hide such "malicious overinformation" more and more with every
> reincarnation of Windows (ever wondered why your desktop is the root
> node in the Windows explorer, obviously its physically located somewhere
> in your $HOMEDIR?). While I surely think this is an issue for Windows
> users, I don't think its monotone's responsibility to clarify how they
> can/should use their chosen operating system and where the standard
> paths are located. Call me biased, but looking back at my Windows time
> just makes me shuddering.

While I appreciate your horror of Windows (me too!!!) I suspect that
you would entice more folks to use/contribute to monotone (seems to be
a goal of this group, yes?) if you made it less daunting, especially
in the initial try-out phase. Example doc could look like:

Now we create a database:

mtn db init --db=~/beth.mtn

Windows:

mtn db init --db=C:\my_db_dir\beth.mtn

in the few places that could use it.

> > Nice, but there doesn't seem to be anything regarding this in the
> > documentation. I'll search it in the mailing list archives, but it
> > would be great if the doc got updated when interesting features are
> > added.
>
> http://monotone.ca/monotone.html#Other-Transports

Yep, I found my way there via a ref in the mailing list. Had read it
before but it hadn't stuck with me.

> Is there some `hostname` command available on Win32? I dunno...

Yep. Seems it's called 'hostname' :-) on my system - AFAIK, have no
shell extensions, so is probably standard.

> I think we should implement this the other way around, and AFAIR this
> has been discussed already: We should add support for auto-recovery to
> monotone and a way to pull a list of available branches remotely from a
> server. Having such information in place would be more useful than the
> error message "your branch pattern does not match any available
> branches" - yeah, what available branches?!
>
> Thomas.

Excellent - I like that. But even the "your branch pattern does not
match any available..." would be more helpful than the current "Sync
succeeded; did nothing" :-) At least "doesn't match available" gives
you a breadcrumb to start figuring out why.
Ken