[Monotone-devel] Re: Some thoughts on ids

[graydon hoare]

address@hidden wrote:

> Obviously there is a derivation difference in that the clearcase 
> IDs are generated by the database and are not tied to the contents
> of the files. The reason why this may be important is that it may
> be worth looking at the clearcase command set and seeing if there
> are any things it does which are useful in terms of hiding the
> underlying ID from the end user. The quick and dirty completion
> stuff monotone already has looks dangerous to me....

yeah, it might be nice to find a friendlier UI for referring to 
versions. I've considered maybe permitting a graph-path encoding with 
"anything that disambiguates" for each label (author, branchname, date, 
hash prefix, numbers assigned from 0..N based on lexicographic order of 
hashes), but I haven't given it a great deal of thought. I wonder if 
it's really easier to refer to friday:address@hidden:2a3 or just to 
get used to the SHA1 values in the few cases you actually need them. 
personally I find writing out arch's highly namespace-qualified 
identifiers cumbersome, but that's just me. I'm interested to hear 
preferences.

so far my strategy is to try to reduce the number of times you have to 
refer to a version at all, and let the user read through "monotone log" 
if they need to pick one out in specific. but I'm open to suggestions 
(especially if patches accompany them).

-graydon