Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Is there something like libmonotone?

[Olivier Andrieu]

 > Bruce Stephens [Thu, 27 Jan 2005]:
 > Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > > On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 01:01:56PM -0600, Matthew A. Nicholson wrote:
 > >> Andreas K?nner wrote:
 > >> >is there something like libmonotone? Just in case someone want to write 
 > >> >a  GUI on top of monotone...
 > >> 
 > >> I don't think there is a libmonotone, but there should be...
 > >
 > > This is actually a matter of debate :-) In particular, graydon
 > > has pointed out that you really _want_ monotone to be a
 > > monolithic program with an extremely limited and well-defined
 > > interface to the rest of the world, because monotone is the only
 > > program we trust to manage your database without screwing things
 > > up.  (we have enough trouble making sure monotone won't screw
 > > things up in the first place...)
 > 
 > Presumably we want things like monotone-viz to be possible.
 > Currently I think that works by accessing the database directly
 > (without using any of monotone).  That means it needs changing
 > whenever the database schema changes, which is undesirable,
 > although presumably it'll become less of a problem as things
 > mature.

That's right, monotone-viz reads the database directly. This is fine
because monotone-viz doesn't compute anything, it simply displays the
ancestry graph which is directly accessible by a couple of SQL
queries. The need to adapt to database schema changes isn't a problem
I think, since other interfaces (library, command line) would change
at the same time too (like when revisions were introduced).

-- 
   Olivier