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

[graydon hoare]

Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:
> On Thursday 09 December 2004 23:42, graydon hoare wrote:
>
> > I'm interested in experimenting with naming schemes which lend more
> > meaning and familiarity to monotone, and look "more boring" (i.e.
> > like CVS or SVN). I'd like to focus the discussion on that if
> > possible.
>
> So, what's your view on the idea of having fork certs, a --fork commit 
> option and using <branch>.<version>[.<author>-<fork>.version>]* to 
> identify revisions?

well, your current proposal has some problems you brush off:

  - it requires some mechanism for differentiating trunks and forks

  - it is not necessarily stable if <author> commits from two places
    and then syncs; one side will see him committing version 1 then 2,
    the other will see him committing version 2 then 1. both sides can
    probably renumber by date, but then, that's just a lesser form of
    "unstable local IDs".. maybe acceptably lesser, but still real.

so I'm not really sold on this either. if we're going to think seriously 
about teaching monotone to differentiate between "linear trunks" and 
"diverging forks" (which is possible -- it has some other benefits), we 
ought to have that conversation in terms of *all* of its implications, 
not just that it happens to make number assignment easier. it probably 
makes some things harder too.

-graydon