On Mar 8, 2004, at 3:32 AM, Trygve Reenskaug wrote:

> Stef,
> I think you confuse two purposes:
>    A lab journal records everything that is done in a series of 
> experiments,
>    including unsuccessful experiments (penicillin was discovered by an 
> unsuccessful experiment)
>
>    A report gives a succinct description of the results of a series of 
> experiments.
>
> You describe tools for the report. They have always been in the form 
> of fileIns, I'm sure Monticello if excellent for that. I am talking 
> about tools for the lab journal, collected semi-automatically. Perhaps 
> I am exceptional in needing a journal to remember exactly what I have 
> done.

Monticello is actually much closer to the lab journal - it's intended 
to capture not just the finished state of the code, but various 
checkpoints along the way.  It doesn't do this linearly (as a changes 
file effectively does) - if you do an experiment, reject it, revert to 
a previous state, and continue from there, that branching structure 
will be captured.  This is very useful if you later decide you want to 
merge two such branches, since it can do this semi-automatically by 
comparing them against their common ancestor.

Monticello may not have the granularity you want, however - it only 
records the state of your source code when you explicitly tell it to, 
not every time you edit a method.  On the plus side, when you 
explicitly save the state Monticello encourages you to log some notes 
about that state, which makes reviewing your past work easier.