[Monotone-devel] Re: restrictions and SVN type branches/tags?

[graydon hoare]

On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 07:57:12 +0200 (CEST), Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker 
<address@hidden> wrote:

> Oooooh, that was an unexpected coolness factor, to combine pulls from
> several servers into one database :-).  I'm now pulling both from
> graydon's server and from yours.

as an added bonus, if you had write permission to the servers you (and
any other clients in similar roles) would be effectively acting as bridges
between them -- on common branches -- copying changes as so:

   echologic.com <->  you  <-> off.net

if I wanted to make sure this process was happening at a given frequency,
I'd just need to leave some sort of client in a loop syncing between the
two servers. or I can wait and let natural diffusion between clients run
its course.

> OK, I got the impression that when I do a 'monotone update' in another
> working directory, it would change to the new branch if it sees that
> cert associated with the head manifest.  Sounds silly, now that I
> think of it, especially if a manifest can be part of several branches
> at once, so I probably made a mistake in my experiments...

there are two senses to your working copy "being on a branch": there's
the set of branch certs attached to the manifest in your working copy
(there can be many of these) and there's the --branch=... argument on
the command line, which is stored persistently in MT/options, and
affects the *single* branch interpreted in any update and commit command.

if you sync, and another branch cert arrives attached to your working
copy manifest, it will not affect the branch specified in MT/options,
so the next commit/update you make will remain on the branch you
want, even though you're now working on a manifest which is "in" multiple
branches. put another way: a manifest may be in many branches, but
a working copy is only on one at a time.

if you want to move off one branch onto another (overlapping or otherwise)
you just need to do monotone update --branch=some.other.branch. at least
in theory. in practise there may of course remain some bugs.

-graydon