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

[Oren Ben-Kiki]

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Giving stable globally usable names to things in such distributed
> systems isn't impossible (Arch has one approach, X.500 another), but
> I'm not sure what would be suitable for monotone.  My guess is that a
> good usable solution is likely to turn out to be local names which
> aren't stable (i.e., they reflect the current local notion of
> revisions), together with stable IDs which are equivalent to hashes.

And Richard Levitte wrote:
> I guess the biggie is, again, distributed databases, and
> communication.  I'm assuming that the version numbers would be highly
> local, and not get distributed to other databases.  That would make
> it tricky for me telling anyone to please look at version 17 of some
> file in my branch, as the other person probably has a different
> version number.

There *is* a way for having stable, readable, consistent distributed 
revision ids, by using CVS-like fork numbers and using the author's 
name as the fork's id:

            /-> 4.bruce.1 -> 4.bruce.2 (fork by bruce)
           /
1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 (main trunk)
     |\
     | \-> 3.richard-1.1 -> 3.richard-1.2 (fork by richard)
      \
       \-> 3.richard-2.1 (another fork by richard)

(This is all within a single branch, of course.)

Have fun,

 Oren Ben-Kiki