[Monotone-devel] Re: Re: Few remarks

[John S. Yates, Jr.]

"Henrik Holmboe" <address@hidden> wrote:

> With that said, one thing that comes to my mind to uniquely identify a
> commit is to use seconds since 00:00:00 1970-01-01 UTC, and the user
> who commited the changeset. It could look something like
> "address@hidden:1102092772". It would be unique and still be
> incrementing (hopefully, or else time would be grinding to a
> halt). Just wanted to throw the suggestion out here. Cant think of
> many downsides to this approach, but I have most probably not thought
> of everything.

Reminds me a bit of the Elephant file system's use of time:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alistair_Veitch/papers/elephant-sosp/efs.pdf

But rather than use seconds since some base I would suggest time stamps.
This has immediate, intuitive and memorizable significance to any user.
And useful, intuitive, reliable fuzzy matching is easily included.

(Seems to me ClearCase did something similar.)

/john