[Monotone-devel] Re: How to remove tag from revision

[Bruce Stephens]

Pablo Delgado <address@hidden> writes:

> Recently I gave the instruction to my developers to tag a certain
> revision with a "DTS-1.4" tag.
> Shortly after, they realized they did not commit the final changes
> that belonged to the release.
> So they commited the recent changes and then tagged the new revision
> with the same tag. When
> I go into the repository and run "mtn list tags" to ensure they had
> done it I see 2 different revisions
> that have the same tag. Which then leads my questions:
>
> 1) Is this a desired behavior for monotone? (Allowing multiple
> revisions to have the same tag)

Yes.

> 2) How do I remove or change the tag for a revision?

With some difficulty!

You'd need to use "mtn db kill_tag_locally DTS-1.4" to remove it, and
then add it back for the one revision you want it for.  But you'd need
to do that in every database (otherwise it'll just get propagated
again).  (Or carefully use "db execute" to do the same kind of thing.)

This is a general problem with distributed systems: you can't stop
multiple people from tagging multiple revisions with the same tag.

(Mercurial's scheme is the neatest for this, I think: tags are stored
in a versioned file, so it can conflict in the normal way.  But even
that has complications, IIRC.)