Re: Is monotone dead, or is there a path forward?

[Michael Raskin]

>On Sat, Jun 05, 2021 at 05:51:38PM +0200, Michael Raskin wrote:
>> >Is anything being done about this?
>> >Is the current botan so incompatible that it's hopeless to adapt?
>> >
>> >Or is monotone development and maintenance truly dead and I need to 
>> >abandon ship and take what data I ca with me?
>> 
>> 1. You can easily check out a branch that actually works with botan2.
>> I package it for Nixpkgs and it seems to work just fine. Unfortunately
>> from bootstrapping point of view, you need some monotone to check out
>> botan2-compatible monotone (for packaging I exported the branch to 
>> GitHub)
>
>Very interesting.  So it looks like making a proper devuan package for 
>monotone would require taking the old source deb, replacing the code 
>with your code, and updating the various dependencies in the old 
>manifest to new ones.

Not even my code! People involved in Monotone development for a long 
time had already done all the actual work… just not the release.

>Even without understanding much about debian packaging, that sounds 
>feasible.
>
>Where do I find the relevant monotone repositories.  (I very much want 
>to preserve history while doing this.)

Yeah, I used monotone's git-export for the same reason. I had to assign 
some dates to some commits where I did not pull the proper date certs
(and Monotone's fast-export dummy date is before git's epoch leading to 
problems)

mtn://code.monotone.ca?net.venge.monotone.lapo.botan2

We already had the following patch applied, so it is not incorporated in
the mirror as it was not in the original branch:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/92c9d7975a828bce3bc8597a83b0bd091fd1ab72/pkgs/applications/version-management/monotone/monotone-1.1-Adapt-to-changes-in-pcre-8.42.patch

>Do the repositories also contain the code normally used to create deb 
>packages?  I am no very familiar with the existing monotone code 
>infrastructure, nor with the processes required to submit an update to a 
>dropped Debian package.

I think this lives separately in tags like debian-monotone-1.1-8

>And what kind of test procedures are there for vetting a monotone 
>release?

Good question… also, good question whether this is now a forgotten 
arcane knowledge.