[Monotone-devel] monotone log and other items

[Richard Li]

Hi,

I have been a happy user of monotone since 0.13 or so. I use it daily
to manage a small repository of files. I compiled a list of some
things that I think could make monotone better.

monotone log

I have a bunch of requests for monotone log. Note that I am somewhat
colored by my previous experiences using Perforce. So if there is a
better way to do what I want to do, please let me know.

1. monotone log updated to use the restrictions branch. Someone
pointed this out a couple weeks ago. (This one drives me nuts,
actually.)

2. monotone log to handle paths as well as filenames. In Perforce
syntax:

monotone log foo/* (get log of all changes in the foo/ directory)

monotone log foo/... (get log of all changes in the foo/ directory
                     and below)

(The ... syntax isn't consistent with the way monotone commit handles
paths so we probably wouldn't want to do that unless we decided that
the explicit recursive notation makes more sense).

3. A short version of monotone log which could look something like:

da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 address@hidden 
2005-05-20T13:55:53
c404db8bd4a1f077692d964388a92b55e5399f06 address@hidden 
2005-05-20T13:55:53

(Right now even with --depth too much scrolls by to really get a list
of previous revisions.

With these changes, I could do something like:

% monotone log foo/*
da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 address@hidden 
2005-05-20T13:55:53
c404db8bd4a1f077692d964388a92b55e5399f06 address@hidden 
2005-05-20T13:55:53
% monotone log --revision=da39a3 --depth=1
Revision: da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709
Ancestor: ...
Author: address@hidden

...

Bigger wish-list items

1. Public key handling: would be nice to use GPG or X509v3 instead of
maintaining yet another passphrase / PKI infrastructure. I am not sure
if using botan will make this easier or if it is unrelated.

2. Best practices. I haven't had the opportunity to push monotone in a
large development environment, so I don't have any real insight here
-- but I think that there's room for documentation and discussion
here.
   - use of branches
   - server configuration (runit?)
   - multiple databases v one database
   - etc.

Richard