Re: [Monotone-devel] Policy branches - first steps

[Paul Crowley]

From the deafening silence, I'm guessing that I might need to make that 
one a bit more bite-size to get some discussion!

At the summit, we had some very interesting ideas and proposals for how 
policy branches could work.  These proposals handled not only policy, 
but namespaces and branch renaming, IDs for developers, server control 
and more.  A number of possibilities were put forward.

However, right now I'm proposing we start by doing the very least we can 
do to introduce something like policy branches without changing anything 
else.  We will want more sophistication for a further release, but this 
will get us started and help us learn about how this stuff plays out in 
practice, which can be more valuable than any amount of theoretical 
discussion.  So here's the proposal in brief.

* A policy branch contains one or more policies
* A policy lists by name the branches it applies to
* It can also indicate that it applies to all branches that start with a 
particular prefix
* It lists the keys which can commit to that branch
* or it delegates all decisions about it to another branch

So: nothing in there to handle branch renames, or to name developers. 
You can't arrange for one branch to have two names because everything is 
explicit about the name it applies to.  A policy may not introduce 
ambiguity.  Nothing else in Monotone needs to change to handle the 
policies, as far as I can tell.

Does that seem like the right way forward?
--
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\/ o\ Paul Crowley, address@hidden
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