Re: [Monotone-devel] Manifest Comments

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Thomas Keller wrote:
> I've not followed this thread completly, but I'd rather tend to extend 
> existing infrastructure than introducing complexity with new levels of 
> metadata (like manifest comments or the like) - if this is really 
> needed. Why shouldn't it be possible to implement hide/read-only 
> settings for file attributes? These would just be flags which would be 
> introduced and honored in a couple of places.

That's what I'm questioning. I've quickly looked into rosters.cc and 
thought about implementing 'vanishing attributes', but I came to the 
impression that adding another type of attributes is getting messy. 
Probably adding a flag to the existing attributes would be easier, but 
where to add that?

I thought into another direction: I was asking myself, what else such 
'manifest comments' could be used for. And figured that many certs never 
change after the revision has been written, i.e. author, changelog and 
date. Why not store those the same way, we would gain delta compression 
for those (which might not actually be that much, given that author and 
changelog change quite often). We would loose the ability to quickly 
search through them, this would have to be done differently.

I don't know about other possible uses, but maybe you can think of it as 
an extension and optimization of certs. (at least those which can be 
read-only after rev. has been written.)

This is brainstorming, I might be terribly wrong.

Regards

Markus