= Monotone Best Practices =

The purpose of this page is to create a set of best practices for the use of pidgin monotone.  When deemed worthy, it will be merged into UsingPidginMonotone.

== Speedups ==
{{{
mtn refresh_inodeprints
}}}
The above command will create a inode cache of your current workspace.  This will dramatically reduce the runtime of mtn status, commit, etc.  Technically this method is less secure then the default behavior.  Please read the [http://monotone.ca/docs/Inodeprints.html official docs] for more information.

== Branching ==
Branching has always been a confusing topic and has always had lots of confusing documentation.  In an attempt to avoid that, the following subtopics are meant to make understand branches easier as well as explain how they work in monotone.

=== Branch names ===
Branch names should be descriptive and follow a hierarchy.  For example, for the 2007 Summer of Code projects, we are using {{{im.pidgin.soc.2007.<project name>}}}.  Using a setup like this, it is easy to tell at a glance of {{{mtn ls branches}}} that {{{im.pidgin.soc.2007.monoloader}}} is a 2007 Summer of Code project branch.

=== Creating Branches ===

==== From a Working Copy ====
To create a branch from your working copy use:
{{{
mtn ci -b <new_branch>
}}}

This will check it the new branch into your local database and change the current branch of your working copy to {{{<new_branch>}}}.  You will of course still need to push your branch out to the "central" server on pidgin.im.

==== From Scratch ====
Someone fill this in, I haven't done it yet.

=== Pulling New Branches ===
If you did not do an initial pull with {{{mtn pull pidgin.im im.pidgin.*}}} it is possible that you will not automagically pull new branches.  If you have noticed a lack of branches in {{{mtn ls branches}}} you can remedy this one of two ways.

From a working copy:
{{{
mtn pull pidgin.im "im.pidgin.*"
}}}

From anywhere:
{{{
mtn -d <path to your pidgin database> pull pidgin.im "im.pidgin.*"
}}}