Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[Jon Bright]

Nathan Myers wrote:
> But that's all neither here nor there.  What matters to us is, 
> when presented 0x43a8e014f2 and 0x43da6c97ba, or JimPieCowCon and
> JimFinGogBan, which are the ones you can remember long enough to 
> recognize when you see them three seconds later, and can maybe
> even type without cutting and pasting.

I just did a quick unscientific experiment with the two word-based 
examples you provided, and I'm afraid the answer, at least for me, is 
"neither".  That said, I could at least attempt it with the words - 
memorising strings of hex digits, I wouldn't even bother attempting.

My personal opinion is that relationships are the more important thing 
here.  A current common use case for me (with CVS) would be:

cvs [log|annotate] blah.c
...ah, looks like 1.35 is the interesting revision...
cvs diff -r 1.34 -r 1.35 blah.c

I could just as easily do

monotone diff parent bc3523 blah.c

Where bc3523 is a quickly-typed prefix of the version that interested me 
and 'parent' is resolved for me by monotone.

There should then probably be stuff like

monotone diff parent2 bc3523 blah.c

For comparing to the grandparent.

If a relationship was ever unclear to monotone (two parents, whatever), 
I'd be more than happy for it to give up, not resolve 'parent' and spew 
an error at me.

--
Jon Bright
Silicon Circus Ltd.
http://www.siliconcircus.com