Re: ANNOUNCE: Debian build scripts on a public Monotone server

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Steve Whalen writes:
> > A quick glance at Monotone's change control history looks like they try
> > to ensure that existing projects can move forward through their
> > improvements.  Do you consider Monotone as "safe" for production
> > environments, even though they're not at "release 1.0" yet? Would you
> > recommend them as an alternative to CVS for new projects needing a
> > version control system, but wanting to be comfortable that they'll not
> > regret entrusting their project to Monotone?
>
> Yes, definitely.  They've had zero data-loss bugs in their entire
> history, despite changing the database schema a couple of times, and
> the netsync protocol another couple of times.  So, yes.

I'd like to add that my confidence in Monotone is not just because I
like the developers' attitude; it is also because:

- Monotone stores the SHA1 sum of everything in the database, and
verifies the sum when checking out, updating, merging, or syncing
between databases.  Any data corruption _will_ be detected, and
Monotone _will_ crash rather than corrupt data (never happened to me
though). (indeed, revision IDs are SHA1 sums, not "monotonic" numbers
that would make no sense in the context of a distributed version
control system).

- all commits to a database are signed by a crypto key, and so
authenticated in a tamper-proof way.

- the database is an SQLite database; one can always retrieve the data
using SQL commands, if things came to worst. In fact, I have already,
and successfully, tampered with some trial databases using SQL
commands. That's the almost only way one can delete data, BTW.

Now Monotone is not perfect, and not 1.0 yet. The areas where perhaps
it might be weak is scalability and performance. In my experience, it
shines both for small projects and for large projects with short
histories ( few revisions). But, apparently, as the number of revisions
grows, Monotone scales less than linearly. They're working on it at the
moment, with the first notable scalability improvements in the latest
version, 0.30.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.