Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Request for help adding monotone output to cvs2svn

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi Bruce,

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> I don't think monotone has such a restriction.  I think it happens not
> to create such revisions at present, but I don't think there's any
> intrinsic requirement that a revision has at most two parents.  I
> imagine an importer from cvs2svn would use "automate put_revision" or
> something, and I suspect that'll be happy with any number of parent
> revisions.

Yes, there is code which relies on having exactly one or two parents. 
AFAIK mainly the mark merge gets difficult when handling revisions with 
multiple parents.

I agreed that revisions with multiple parents *should* be supported. 
Even if they are mainly useful for such imports or hand merged 
revisions. But one needs to think around the mark merge issues, among 
other probably smaller problems.

> Yes, I think the former. I think it would be natural to have them on a
> branch, maybe one named relative to the tag name.  (Or identical to
> the tag name, as you did with git.)

Agreed. One might even argue if it's necessary to the tag the head of 
that branch. Because obviously, that wasn't really a tag in CVS, but 
much more like a branch.

Especially for incremental imports, that will get tricky!

> > > (In git it's normal for a branch to contain divergence in its past,
> > Uh.. what do you mean by that?
>
> I mean the graph of a branch may not be linear, but will (by
> definition) only have one head.  Such a thing will be the result of a
> merge, and at that point the two (or more) things being merged would
> normally be distinct branches.  In monotone it's normal just to let a
> branch fork for short periods, but in git that doesn't really make
> sense---each of the forks is a separate branch.

Aha, understood. I stumbled across the "contain divergence in its past", 
which is very well possible with monotone, too.

Regards

Markus