Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Certificates for files

[Thomas Haas]

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Thomas Haas <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> 
>>Actually. you and Nathaniel are right: the certificates I would like
>>to use make a statement about a specific revision of a file. As
>>there is no notion of a revision of a file (only revision of a
>>tree), it does not seem right to me to use the existing certificates
>>for my purpose -- although technically possible.
> 
> 
> Yes, you just get revisions of a tree, and blobs of data, and each
> revision has a manifest, and each manifest maps a filename to a blob
> of data.  
> 
> So that doesn't really let you talk about a version of a file without
> giving a revision of a tree as well.  
> 
> But I'd have though that's OK: almost all of the cases I can think of
> for commenting on a file would be in the context of the rest of the
> tree anyway.  For example, that README has been checked, and is
> suitable for the release.  For that kind of case, I can imagine you'd
> want some shortcuts, so you could fix INSTALL, but keep README as
> being approved, but you could have scripts and things to do that.

It is a semantical thing to me. I understand that certificates in
monotone today make a statement about a certain state (=revision) of the
whole tree. Monotone does not have a notion of a statement about a
subset of a tree. (Note: this is not a critic towards monotone, just a
fact.)

OF course, one can add to the statement, that actually the statement
only concerns a subset of the tree (ie a file or set of files) and not
the whole tree. While technical possible, I consider it a hack, because
monotone itself or related tools will never understand and support this
statements. Hence, no point in using certs for this purpose (for me).

Thanks
- tom