[Monotone-devel] Random thoughts on branches

[Derek Scherger]

I've been playing around with ls_branches a bit lately (trying to reduce
the output to something a bit more useful) and a couple of ideas come to
mind:

1. It might be nice to exclude branches that have been merged back to
some other branch (i.e. ...experiment.rosters has been merged and is
probably not that interesting anymore). This turns out to be
straightforward to do by using the revision_ancestry table to get all
revisions with no children and simply listing the branch certs on them.

2. It might also be nice to list only branches that have had new
revisions arrive since some, hook specified, date. This appears to be
more difficult to do in reasonable time as it would require running
heads on every branch and then checking the date certs on the head
revisions. Since arriving revs may have arbitrarily old date certs on
them it might also not show revisions that have arrived recently, but
were created not so recently.

All of this makes me think of the policy branch stuff and I wonder how
it might help. Presumably it will be possible to rename branches, and
perhaps mark them as closed (so that they would not show up in branch
listings).

In svn, for example, branches have a lifetime like any other node in the
tree (since they are represented as tree nodes) which makes it possible
to create a branch, work on it for a while and then delete it when
you're done.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Derek