[Monotone-devel] Re: Re: Re: How will policy branches work?

[Boris]

On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:51:27 +0200, Markus Schiltknecht  
<address@hidden> wrote:

> Boris wrote:
> > It might be possible if policy settings and the list of administrators  
> > are stored in the database. Even if you have a copy of the database the  
> > database knows who the admininistrators are and will prevent others  
> > from changing the policy settings. Of course if administrators
>
> Who are 'the administrators' in a distributed setting? I know, this  
> might be very clear in a hierarchically organized company. However, for  
> lots of open source projects, I would consider every single developer as  
> the admin of his repository.

Yes, that's a different scenario. Ideally centralized permission settings  
are optional.

> [...]If the files for these activation components are in the same  
> branch, each revision maintains a hash over their contents. So, if the  
> new co-worker is denied downloading those files, he cannot completely  
> validate the revision. That would clearly speak for splitting those  
> files into its own projects.
>
> OTOH, that new co-worker cannot change these files, so monotone could  
> simply skip the hash calculation for those files and reuse the existing  
> hashes from the parent revision. I'm slowly beginning to think, that  
> what you want here, is policy branches in conjunction with partial  
> checkouts (where these activation component files are missing).

The problem is the co-worker shouldn't be allowed to check out the files  
at all. Management doesn't want anyone else except the responsible  
developers to see the source code. That would need to be guaranteed by the  
version control system - easy if it's a centralized one, arguably more  
difficult if it's a distributed one. I don't know if this will ever be  
possible with monotone (I don't even know if such a scenario is supported  
by any other distributed version control sytem) but these are the  
requirements I face. :)

Boris