Re: [Monotone-devel] Question on layering

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 02:46:41PM +0000, Joel Crisp wrote:
> 1) automation [monotone automate]
> 2) importing the monotone headerfiles and some cpp code and building a
> new C++ app which uses the underlying monotone C++ types
> 3) hit the DB directly
> 
> I think from my previous understanding that (1) is the preferred
> option, but I am worried about performance, particularly on very large
> databases (just one of our apps is 77,000+ files with over 50
> developers). Also, (2) gives me lua essentially for free.
> 
> Thoughts?

Can you be more specific on these performance issues you're worried
about?  There's no particular reason why automate has to be slow; most
monotone operations are bound by algorithmic and IO costs, not
shuffling-data-through-a-pipe costs -- and when you use automate
stdio, you get to take advantage of all of monotone's existing caching
infrastructure, etc.

There might sometimes be cases where particular operations can be made
more efficient using info that isn't exposed over stdio -- one example
that comes to mind is the super-fast graph traversal stuff that Thomas
has been adding to log, annotate, etc. -- but if people need that sort
of thing exposed, we'd generally like to know so we can add it to
automate anyway...

With (2) and (3) you're pretty much on your own.

> (You may also get monotree updated too as part of this.)

If you're working on monotree, you might want to hook up with the
mtteam guys.

> On a side topic, not being able to sync with the monotone master
> repository from behind our corporate firewall/proxy is a bit of a
> pain. Does anyone have a way to access the venge.net repository over
> HTTP tunneling? That and FTP is all our firewall will let through, and
> there is no way I will ever be able to change that.

I don't know the answer to this... someone else might.

> On a second side topic, Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 (Aka Oracle
> Unbreakable Linux) appears to only have boost 1.32 - the latest
> monotone appears to required boost 1.33 - is this essential?

The latest version of mtn probably works fine with earlier boosts --
we originally added that requirement to make boost::program_options
happy, and then threw boost::program_options out -- but no-one has
bothered to check.  Feel free to try :-).

Alternatively, there's always the static binary on the website:
  http://monotone.ca/downloads/0.32/mtn-0.32-linux-x86.bz2
This is just a straight no-dependencies linux executable, drop it in
your path and go.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Damn the Solar System.  Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with
comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better one myself.
  -- Lord Jeffrey