[Monotone-devel] Re: Keyword substitution?

[Bruce Stephens]

"Todd A. Jacobs" <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Say you have revision foo of file bar, only you don't *know* what
> revision it is; more importantly, it's not the head revision.

Under what circumstances would you have a naked file like that?
Wouldn't the usual case be a tree of files, which could presumably
contain the MT directory?  Or a tree somehow exported, which could
include revision information (once it was decided what would be useful
to include)?

And if you did have a naked file, why would it be useful to determine
exactly where it came from?  What are you going to do, that knowing
that would help?  

I suspect it's just as likely that you'd have some file (a script or
bit of config or something) that came from some revision but had
(possibly) been changed a little.  You'd want to know where it came
from to know how it had been changed, and perhaps how it had been
revised in the repository.  And in that case searching for its hash
would likely be a waste of time, because it's probably been changed.
Having a keyword of some kind might help, in that case.

[...]