Limitations of Monotone

This page lists limitations of monotone which will affect Pidgin developers, as well as known workarounds and upstream status. It is not intended to be a monotone bug tracker, but rather a place to gather high-priority problems which we might want to either work on in monotone or bring to the attention of the regular monotone developers.

• No workspace merge - The inability to perform logical fixups at merge-time (only conflict fixups) introduces a glitch into our traditional "Pidgin should always compile" philosophy. While we recognize that a DVCS may require some workflow changes, this isn't one we're ready to give up on, yet.
• Partial Pull - Complete (initial) pulls of Pidgin are ~35 minutes on a fast connection. This is too long to expect any casual developer to invest. There are several possible mitigations for this (and monotone is working on both complete pull improvements, and partial pull):
  • Provide a monotone-to-svn (or similar) gateway for "casual" development. Obviously the severe limitations of svn will make this painful for serious development, and we would not provide a svn-to-monotone gateway; however, for one-off patches from parties with limited interest, it would probably suffice.
  • Provide a monotone database (or database dump) for download; this bootstraps the process, and while it requires a large download, it is much less CPU-intensive and quite a bit faster than a proper pull. It looks like a bzipped database dump is about 80MB at this point.
• Key identity as user-chosen string, rather than fingerprint, etc. -- I'm getting tired of fixing "I lost my key" problems.
• No way to "preview" a netsync - Almost every developer has, by now, asked for a mtn push --dry-run type command.