Re: [Monotone-devel] A few thoughts...

[Nathaniel Smith]

A few random comments...

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 03:34:26AM +0300, Ori Berger wrote:
> Lua; IMHO Python would be a better choice, because of being better 
> known, and having more libraries. It's just as easy to statically embed.

I kinda agree here; Python has a _lot_ of mindshare (he said, having
watched basically everyone he hangs out with switch one-by-one to
Python as a default language), and there's some interesting
convergence going on... as far as I can tell, the current
OSS-best-of-breed-or-will-be-once-more-people-notice in each of issue
tracking, documentation generation, build tools, and test automation
are in Python.  Making Monotone play nice with Python seems like a
good thing :-).

I won't pretend to entirely understand Graydon's design nose; I'd have
been tempted to write Monotone in Python myself (of course, last I
heard Graydon actually disliked Python, so that might be part of
it...).  But I do think that his argument is quite consistent with the
rest of the design of Monotone as it exists... I think what I really
argue for in the above is a nice way to read/manipulate databases from
Python, and it's not clear that making Python the extension language
is terribly relevant to that either way.

> Boost; I'm close to temporarily suspend my principle of building 
> everything from source - I've spent an hour and a half and while I 
> made great progress, I couldn't properly build it because of boost. 
> I'll try that again tomorrow.

Ah, c'mon, it's not that bad; it only took me a day or two... of paid
full-time work... well... okay, it's pretty bad.

> Friendly Names; It's possible to encode SHA1 codes into phrases 
> which can easily be uttered through the phone and easily (?) 
> memorized - see, e.g. Oren Tirosh's work on 
> http://tothink.com/mnemonic . This makes out-of-band communication 
> of versions and trust much more feasible.
> Also, it could be useful if you can assign a local name to a trusted 
> cert. For example, if I assign the name "graydon" to graydon's 
> public key, I'd like "monotone-0.5/my:graydon" to refer to a branch 
> which graydon's key certified has the name "monotone-0.5". Without a 
> local name assignment, the same branch would be named 
> "monotone-0.5/sha1:123f87861e27b6178d6289376189237" or
> "monotone-0.5/mnemonic:magic-slang-crimson--inch-calypso-ibiza--candle-studio-domino--chance-fiction-spider--harvard-gorilla-madonna"
> (using Oren's mnemonic encoder. Neither is easy to memorize or 
> communicate over the phone, but the latter is much much easier).

I actually spent some time playing with pronounceable tree versions
after previous IRC discussion.
http://njs.myrathi.com/~njs/monotone/depot.cgi, group "bibblebabble",
branch "bibblebabble", public key at
http://njs.myrathi.com/~njs/monotone/address@hidden has a
description and proof-of-concept implementation of a mnemonic-y system
of the sort you describe -- one I think superior to Oren Tirosh's for
the case at hand.  I'm somewhat torn on the actual usefulness of this
given Graydon's completion stuff; it still seems nice, but I'm not
sure if it's nice enough to matter.  Anyway, that repository has a
little filter you can pipe the output of monotone through to convert
hex into "bibblebabble coding", so people can get a feel what it
looks like...

(Note that one of the design considerations in the system, that I
probably don't make clear, is the assumption that in general one only
needs a word or two to uniquely identify a tree version, so in general
one will be passing around single words/word pairs.)

(Incidentally, I had to fix the depot schema in order to commit to
multiple groupname's; it's a trivial fix to reproduce, or just merge
ed906339489d321d1aeec686e4305e68065399d1 from my depot...)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
  -- The Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling