Re: [Monotone-devel] YANQ (yet another newbie question)

[Ken MacDonald]

> It;s probably worthwhile to document recommended practices for the use
> of monotone, addressing matters like:
>    how do you organise multiple projects
>    What to do if after your initial enthusiasm, you decide you picked
>      the wrong project names, or even an entire wrong tree structure
>    How the developer should organise his workspace for multiple
>      projects
>
> Similarly, the new monotone user is at a loss as to best practices, or
> even what are good practices to choose from, with the concomitant fear
> that he won't be able to change his mind once he has set out wrong.
>
> -- hendrik

Good thought, Hendrik!

In my mind, I model a developer, i.e. me, as having multiple projects,
and then each project having multiple activities (corresponding to
branches) associated with it that I may be involved in, so I proposed
the directory/workspace hierarchy of /developer/project/branches in my
previous message. I expect that /project/developer/branches could work
equally well in some cases, but for some reason, I don't care for it
much - I guess perhaps the highest level being the developer
corresponds well with physical separation of machines (each developer
having a laptop) where the project/developer/branches model is awkward
here.

In any case, for multiple projects/branches, naming of 'stuff' is
quite important. While I applaud the idea that mtn can create
workspaces with arbitrary names, it is in fact good practice to name
things consistently and clearly. In the case I've outlined, I intend
to name the subdirectories/workspaces after the names of the branch
they contain. I've seen an awful lot of developers name all sorts of
things fairly randomly over the years, and 18 months later spend all
afternoon pawing through directories and code to find something they
need. So, if you're working on a shopping cart, call your branch
"shopping_cart" (with the usual stuff prepended ala the "branch naming
conventions") and create your workspace in a directory called
"shopping_cart". If you name your workspace "mydevdir" you won't have
a clue later which "dev" project you worked on in it....

Just my .02, YMMV :-)
Ken