Re: [Monotone-devel] One-step checkouts?

[Brian Campbell]

I don't think it would be good to simplify these down to one command;  
that just wouldn't really fit monotone's model. In the current  
version of monotone, these can be simplified somewhat, and perhaps  
the docs should be modified to take advantage of this. For instance,  
I'm pretty sure you don't need to say --key=""; if anonymous reading  
is permitted, it will default to an empty key, and you can also  
abbreviate the --db and --branch options.

monotone -d monotone.db db init
monotone -d monotone.db pull venge.net net.venge.monotone
monotone -d monotone.db -b net.venge.monotone co monotone

Not much better, but a little. I think you could then make the  
simplification that if a database is specified explicitly and it  
doesn't exist, you could just automatically do a db init on it, which  
would simplify it down to

monotone -d monotone.db pull venge.net net.venge.monotone
monotone -d monotone.db -b net.venge.monotone co monotone

Another simplification you could make is to default to using a  
database named "~/.monotone/monotone.db". This probably wouldn't be  
too unreasonable, as long as you still allowed people to explicitly  
select a database. At this point, you would have:

monotone pull venge.net net.venge.monotone
monotone -b net.venge.monotone co monotone

At this point, I think you've simplified it down about as much as you  
can without fundamentally changing the basic model of monotone.  
Possibly if we move to the new venge.net/monotone syntax for  
specifying branches, you could infer the name of the directory from  
the last component of the branch name to simplify it even further,  
but I'm not sure how important that is. I guess you could take that  
to an extreme and try to infer the server name from the branch if  
only the branch was provided, but that would simply not work in so  
many cases, and may be a security risk, that I don't think it would  
be a good thing to do.

Having these be two commands helps emphasize to new users the  
distributed model, in which you separate local commits and updates  
from syncs, pulls, and pushes over the network. I've found that the  
two stage commit (committing to the local db and then syncing with a  
server) causes new users some confusion, but that's really  
fundamental to the distributed nature of monotone, and so I think  
it's OK to have them encounter it early when they do their initial  
pull and checkout.

Anyhow, what do people think of the simplifications I suggested? Are  
they worth implementing? Would it be too confusing to have dbs  
magically appear in your .monotone directory?

On Jun 29, 2005, at 10:46 PM, Eric Kidd wrote:

> Many thanks to all the Monotone developers for such a cool program! I
> hope you won't mind if venture a tiny suggestion.
>
> Monotone makes me very happy, once I get it running.  But it could
> make a better first impression if the initial checkout sequence were
> shorter, and defaulted a bit better.
>
> Checking out the monotone tree currently requires three steps:
>
>   $ monotone --db=monotone.db db init
>   $ monotone --db=monotone.db --key="" pull venge.net  
> net.venge.monotone
>   $ monotone --db=monotone.db --branch=net.venge.monotone co monotone
>
> Anonymous CVS checkouts take two steps, login and checkout.  But SVN
> does a particularly nice job of this:
>
>   $ svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kjs
>
> This produces a local directory named kjs/ containing exactly the  
> source I need.
>
> Is it desirable to have a short "initial checkout" sequence?  And if
> so, do people have any thoughts about what syntax to use?
>
> Cheers,
> Eric