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

[Jerome Fisher]

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:

> 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.)
>  

Hmm. Am I missing something, or are you ignoring the case where a single
author has multiple databases (which may well be differ greatly from one
another)? It seems to me that gets back to the problem of rearranging
conflicting fork IDs when netsyncing a single author's databases.

I'm not a fan of unstable revision IDs, though nobody seems to complain
about this in BitKeeper. BitKeeper uses unstable revision IDs and
stable, global, human-unfriendly keys. The user interface is so focused
on the former that users are often unaware of the latter (which can be a
bad thing). Note that the BitKeeper's revision IDs do tend to stabilise
over time, especially in the common case of having a central,
authoritative repository that people regularly sync with.

I'm a little surprised that nobody has brought up tags in this
discussion; perhaps they don't work well enough in monotone yet (how are
conflicts handled?).

Regards,
Jerome