Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: how to merge trees

[Florian Weimer]

* Bruce Stephens:

> address@hidden writes:
>
>> This is why I think directories should contain some form of UID for
>> the files in them not just the file name.
>
> I could imagine that making the code a bit easier to follow, rather
> than having it try to regenerate file identities in the way that
> Nathaniel is describing.  I suspect there's a danger of the UIDs
> escaping, and users wanting to do things with them, and I'm not sure
> that that would be good.  Also I guess there's a conversion problem if
> we imagine the UIDs being shared between repositories: you'd want to
> make sure that everyone agreed on the UIDs.

Short, sequentially assigned UIDs are important for large
repositories, too, because they tend to provide much better locality
than hashes.

Unfortunately, there isn't any obvious way to assign short globally
unique IDs in a fully distributed system. 8-(