This page is one of many describing EvaluationFeatures that may be useful when comparing monotone to other similar (and not-so-similar) VCS systems.
Description
Easy and cheap branching to allow parallel lines of development, and sophisticated history-aware merging for keeping branches in sync.
Supported
Monotone's implementation of branches is extremely lightweight, and quite different from that in many other systems.
Revisions can be in multiple branches (or none). Revisions can be added to branches long after they are first committed, perhaps after testing or code review to determine that they are suitable. Monotone separates completely the concept of a file's history (which is important for merging) from the concept of a branch (which is important for developers keeping track of the purpose of a particular development effort and view of the code). The BranchAnalogy describes the separation of these concepts.
Monotone also has very robust and powerful merging capabilities (see Merging).
Example Usage
To commit some changes in a workspace to a new branch:
<edit files>
$ mtn commit -b com.example.new-branch-name
Further Reference
Manual and Tutorial Sections:
Features and Requirements in other evaluations:
- FreeBSD's VCSFeatureBranch