[Monotone-devel] Proposal for human readable revision IDs

[Thomas Haas]

Hi all

Although using monotone for a while, I cannot get used to easily read,
compare, and for sure not type monotone's revision identifiers. 40 bytes
of hex is too complicated for me. Also the rather long revision,
manifest and file identifiers use up a lot of precious real estate in
various outputs, such as ls, cat, or log.

RFC 1751 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1751.html) describes a method for
representing 128 bit keys as a list of English words. While easier to
read, RFC 1751 does not solve the problem of real estate.

Using the alphabet (A-Z, a-z) and the ten digits would reduce the real
estate from 40 to 27 characters.

Additionally, or alternatively, a different, persistent representation
of the various identifiers could ease the use of monotone. E.g.
revisions could be counted as in sub-version or monotone limit itself to
display identifiers as short as possible, while still unique (the result
could be fed into monotone complete to get the full identifier).

Personally, I would prefer some short, readable identifier valid only
for my database.

Opinions?

Regards
- tom