If you follow what's happening with monotone, you've probably seen that there's been some major development lately, and that we're getting much closer to a version 1.0. As a matter of fact, 0.99 is more or less to be seen as a pre-release, or RC1, or something like that.

It's full of nice little tricks that you can do to make yoru life easier. For example, to do some on-the-side processing, it's often not at all necvessary to pull a mirror of the database, as there is a mechanism to do runt remote commands (that are performed by the server, with the output being sent back to you). Mail notification scripts and other things like that have been updated to use these new features.

Just among the little cool things that weren't possible before, copying branches from one database into another, with full control over revision, the revision graph and all that, is done as simply as this:

mtn -d /PATH/TO/MY/db.mtn pull file:///PATH/TO/OTHER/database.mtn '*'

Actually, if you use monotone regularly, I urge you to try 0.99 today. It's been thoroughly tested, among other by being used live on the monotone server, and is a good way to get to know the new and changed features without having to wait until 1.0.

When is 1.0 coming out? I don't really know, but there's a desire to get it out before the end of the year. I jokingly said on the developers mailing list that we could make a Christmas release... and maybe that's a joke that'll be reality, eh Thomas (1)?