Re: [Monotone-devel] Ideas and questions.

[Derek Scherger]

Joel Rosdahl wrote:
> Have you considered taking this machinery a bit further, to enable
> branch renaming? What I'm thinking (and it's probably not a novel
> idea) is that maybe branch certs could store epochs instead of branch
> names? Then some commands could be added for managing a mapping
> between branch epochs and names. Would this be possible? If so, what
> are the arguments against?

I had this thought today as well, and it really does seem like it might 
be a good idea.

Some way of syncing branch rename operations would be needed though so 
that if two databases have disagreeing names with the same hash (i.e. 
branch fred with hash 1234 verses branch barney with hash 1234) there's 
some way for netsync to resolve this.

Perhaps this could be as easy as requiring the local database branch 
name to always agree with the remote database branch name from the point 
of view of the client. So if I'm trying to push fred to joel's server 
and he has it as barney then I would have to rename fred to barney 
before this would be possible.

Similarly as for epochs, if two names disagree on the branch hash, one 
of them (again as I understand the epoch idea the local branch) must be 
updated so that its hash matches the remote one before a sync is possible.

This seems like it should work and would make renaming branches at least 
possible.

Cheers,
Derek