[Monotone-devel] Re: Cherry-Picking, Renames, Etc.

[graydon hoare]

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> At any rate, we spent some time thinking about it, and I came up with 
> the following insight:
>
>     If you have a good 3-way merge, you can "cherry-pick" *anything*.

yeah. this is what we all seem to be settling on (and afaik already have 
a command to sort-of do.. more soon). we all agree this is a workable 
idea in theory. we have to give it a shot in practise before getting too 
happy about it though :)

> Most files in a version control system are source files. And source 
> files have comments. And it is trivial to say that, if a file contains 
> the pattern, say, address@hidden&*, then it has the unique id 
> "alphabet-soup". And given a small utility that generates these 
> strings, it is easy to embed a UID in new source files.

this is how "arch tags" work in arch. it seems like some people like 
them and some don't. personally I'm not a big fan, but they do address 
part of the issue (of course they're no help in other degenerate cases 
like "two files have the same tag" or "file got split into two", but no 
concept of "file identity" works then)

> Plan B is keeping, "near" the source file, a file saying which UID it 
> has. This uid file should be in the same directory as the source file 
> (either a ".monotone.uids" file, or .monotone/<file-name>.uid, or

yeah, this is one of the other arch "tagging methods" to keep track of 
files. again, I'm not a big fan, but it also works. arch, being flexible 
and all, provides you several ways of identifying files. I understand 
why they do it, I just don't think the trade is worth the cost in 
conceptual complexity.

<philosophy>
a lot of this is just trading conceptual simplicity for features. my 
work on monotone comes down on the side of simplicity somewhat more 
often than some people want, but it's *usually* intentional. in any 
case, it's good to talk things over to make sure.
</philosophy>

-graydon