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

[Bruce Stephens]

"John S. Yates, Jr." <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> I like [developer id, UTC of commit].  Assuming that developers do
> not spoof their identities (hence cannot be committing into multiple
> archives at precisely the same instant) this should be globally
> stable.  It has connotive value and UTC values are ordered.  It is
> true that given such a [developer id, UTC of commit] pair it is
> impossible to predict the next pair. 

Or the previous pair.  So really it's more or less opaque, so I'm
going to end up doing cut and paste to actually use it, aren't I?  (In
which case hashes seem OK, too: they've got no whitespace or
punctuation, so cut and paste works rather nicely.)

> But then given a hash it is also impossible to predict the next
> hash.

True, but I thought the idea was to come up with something better,
preferably better in several dimensions.

> A virtue of these [developer id, UTC of commit] pairs is that they admit
> to many obvious sugarings:
>
>   developer missing => me
>   distinct punctuation to distinguish UTC vs. local time
>   fuzzy time matching
>   etc

I'm unconvinced.  On the positive side, I think you can use this
already as a selector: I'd be all in favour of adding options so that
monotone would print out suitable strings as well as (or instead of,
if you like) hashes.