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

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Bruce Stephens wrote:
> That strikes me as impractical.  How can I merge two revisions if I
> can't see some of the changed files?

You should be able to merge, as long as the revisions you are trying to 
merge both point to the same revid for all invisible or disallowed 
files. Otherwise, you can't possibly merge, since you are not allowed to 
have access to the files which need to be merged.

> If my local repository contains
> the files, how convincing is it that I'm prevented access to them in
> some sense?

Huh? To cover these scenarios, your local repository shouldn't contain 
any file you are not allowed to see. Meaning, this is something which 
needs to be handled during netsync. Everything else wouldn't solve the 
problem at hand, IMO.

> > Keeping in mind the 'patent violation' case, where one wants to remove
> > specific files from all historic revisions, you'd quite certainly want
> > to control access to single files, one day.
>
> I suspect in that case you want to *remove* the files

No. In case one of my public projects (as if there were some..) would 
violate patents, I'd want to disallow public access to those files. And 
prevent anybody from downloading them. However, I'd certainly keep them 
in my own, private repository ;-)

> not just
> control access to them.  And yes, that's really hard (impossible,
> really) in a distributed system.

I don't think it's impossible. But it's certainly hard to implement. It 
would require handling (merging, checking-out, committing, ...) 
revisions where you are missing some files contents. As those are 
referenced by hash, that doesn't seem overly impossible.

> So I doubt it's worth worrying overly much about---better to
> concentrate on more common situations that might be solvable.

Oh yeah, I absolutely and full heartedly agree to that!

Markus