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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 10:13:51AM +0200, Oren Ben-Kiki wrote:
> On Friday 10 December 2004 03:18, Brian P. Campbell wrote:
> > Once you start talking about branch.author.seq#, you
> > might as well just use the selectors that are already built in. I
> > think the current set of selectors could be enhanced a little. For
> > instance, various people have discussed adding +n or -n for walking
> > up and down the tree, which I think is a great idea.
> 
> The +n/-n notation has a problem when there's a fork (or merge).

Yeah, but this is a separate and solvable problem.

[snip]
> For this to work, it is necessary to be able to retract a tag from a 
> revision (for "renumbering"). Is this possible today? There's no 
> --untag command... I suppose that being able to retract any cert could 
> cause problems, but the restricted case of tags makes more sense.

There's no --untag command because it's impossible to delete a cert.

The best you can do is to issue a second cert saying "err, never mind
about that cert over there", but this hasn't been done because it has
some drawbacks.  Suddenly every time you look up a cert, you have to
go do another database lookup to make sure it hasn't been retracted
(and presumably this can happen recursively or something), and I don't
even have the slightest idea how you deal with the trust issues (i.e.
specifying whether person A can retract person B's cert)...

> > Finally, I think the default date
> > format should be changed. "T" just isn't a good delimiter; I can't
> > immediately scan it and see the separation between date and time. I
> > realize that that is an ISO standard, but I don't think it's a very
> > good one. Using just a space would make it much easier to read, but
> > really any standard delimiter character would work better than a "T".
> 
> My favorite character here is be '+': 2004-12-10+13:12:45. It makes 
> perfect sense if you think about the date-only part as specifying the 
> base time of 00:00:00; you then have to add the time part to get to the 
> full timestamp value. It is a real pity that time zone deltas have the 
> wrong sign, otherwise timestamps would have been a simple expression 
> resulting in the UTC.
[...]

Why not "_" or "." or ","?  They're much closer to a space in
readability, easy to type at the shell, and have no other meaning in
dates...

Or for that matter, "=" makes a really good visual delimiter.

2004-12-10+13:12:45

2004-12-10.13:12:45

2004-12-10,13:12:45

2004-12-10_13:12:45

2004-12-10=13:12:45

-- Nathaniel

-- 
When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
  -- The Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling