Monotone is an Open Source software tool for revision control. Monotone tracks revisions to files, groups sets of revisions into changesets, and tracks history across renames. The design principle is ... More

Monotone is an Open Source software tool for revision control. Monotone tracks revisions to files, groups sets of revisions into changesets, and tracks history across renames. The design principle is distributed operation making heavy use of cryptographic primitives to track file revisions (via the SHA1 secure hash) and to authenticate user actions (via RSA cryptographic signatures). Each participant maintains their own revision history store in a local SQLite database. Monotone is especially strong in its support of a diverge/merge workflow, which it achieves in part by always allowing commit before merge. Revisions are exchanged using the custom netsync protocol which has its own IANA-assigned port (4691) and is supported by a Wireshark plug-in for traffic analysis (netsync shares some conceptual ground with rsync and cvsup). The focus of the project is on integrity over performance. Prior to some heavy optimisation in revision 0.27, this emphasis on correctness over optimisation was often blamed for causing poor initial experiences. The first action of a new user is often to synchronize (clone) a large existing Monotone database, an action which used to take hours to execute due to the extensive validation and integrity checking which Monotone performs when revisions are moved through the network. Once the initial (clone) database is populated, subsequent actions are usually quick. There is still room for further optimisation on some rarer functions.  [edit]  Less