Monotone

There are certain moments in my life where I feel this love. Love and satisfaction. In these moments I do not regret at all to still work for an “underdog” version control system like monotone and have not converted to the dark side of the moon (read: git). One of these moments was today, when I did a merge between two branches. See, many people working with Subversion or even git are annoyed of its merge behaviour. Sometimes they even fear to merge because hell breaks loose if the source branch moved files or even directories (yikes!) around. I cannot tell how often I had to resolve tree conflicts by hand in Subversion and I also cannot tell how often git forced me to clean my workspace from uncommitted or stashed changes before I was able to pull new stuff in. Today now with monotone, I propagated the latest changes from the main branch to my little source-tree-cleanup branch. The latter moves many files and even whole directories around, so one would expect merge chaos in an ordinary version control system if files inside these moved directories would have been changed, or even new files would have been added, in the main branch in the meantime, right? Not so with monotone. It not only tracks the file identity and rename history for files, but also for directories, so the merge went flawlessly without manual intervention: $ mtn update mtn: updating along branch 'net.venge.monotone.source-tree-cleanup' ... mtn: adding test/func/diff order hinzu mtn: adding test/func/diff order/ driver .lua hinzu ... mtn: updating NEWS ... mtn: updating src/cmd diff log.cc mtn: updating src/cmd list.cc ...