Re: [Monotone-devel] movable monotone tags

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 02:29:06PM +0300, Stanislav Karchebny wrote:
> On Thursday 26 May 2005 10:00, you wrote:
> 
> > Movable certs aren't really possible with the distributed nature of
> > monotone.  Basically, the old position of the tag might always came
> > back and bite you.
> 
> Yeah it can.
> 
> Here's a little relevant bit of info i think from the git list
> "Superceded tags"
> http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=111719320004462&w=2

Eh, this is not really a problem; or at least, it's just the same
problem you always have with parallel changes.  (I.e., just like
branches can have multiple heads, if you make tags versioned, they can
have multiple heads too.  Not very surprising.)

AFAICT it's perfectly _possible_ to support versioned tags; you can
think of each tag as being like a unique file, and its contents the
revid that's being tagged -- then it's clear that if you know how to
version files, you can come up with a way to version tags as well.

Practically speaking, though, it's a big pain to add another "type" of
object that can be versioned, teach all the code about it, teach
netsync about it, and so on and so on.  So I wouldn't expect to see
this in monotone particularly soon...

It does suggest another possibility for dealing with the original use
case, where tags are used to tell an autobuilder what to build: you
could instead have a branch that contains a file telling the
autobuilder what to build, and the autobuilder checks out this file,
looks at it, and does whatever.  Dunno if this is better or worse
than the other solutions suggested, but it's an option :-).

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain:
Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise!
Each stamps its image as the other flies"
  -- Ann Ward Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho