Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: renaming branches (was Re: Ideas and questions.)

[Jeremy Fincher]

On Feb 17, 2005, at 3:50 AM, graydon hoare wrote:

> Jeremy Fincher wrote:
>
> > I'm not sure if this is necessary, or if it's a good thing to 
> > enforce.  People *will* pick duplicate branch names.  There is no 
> > doubt in my mind that many people will have branches named "bugs" or 
> > "main" or "dev", etc.  No matter how many times we say, "Pick a 
> > globally unique name!" people still will not do so.  I think, rather 
> > than have the database *enforce* unique human-readable names, we 
> > should instead have the user disambiguate such collisions himself.
>
> I think you misunderstand what I mean. I mean that in one user's 
> database, they would have a 1:1 mapping between an "alias" and a 
> branch ID. other users, in other databases, could have different (or 
> colliding) aliases. but the user would not have either of these cases:
>
>   - 2 aliases mapping to the same branch ID in a database
>   - 1 alias mapping to two different branch IDs in a database

I'm not misunderstanding you, I don't think.  I'm suggesting that this 
latter case, where one human-readable name maps to two different branch 
IDs in the database, is a perfectly fine state of affairs, and is 
indeed preferable to enforcing that 1:1 mapping you suggest.

> I want to prohibit those, at a UI level, because it makes the UI 
> significantly more surprising and hard to predict.

I don't think it does.  When Monotone encounters a clash, it asks the 
user which branch he wants, and caches that decision in a 
human-readable configuration file in MT or ~/.monotone or similar.

I think this actually makes the UI *less* surprising and hard to 
predict, in fact, because then the user doesn't need to know if the 
original author of the branch changes its name from "dev" to 
"supybot-dev" or similar -- if he's already disambiguated it, he can 
continue using whatever alias he provided for it.

> > Of course, this wouldn't be very user-friendly if the user had to 
> > disambiguate branch names *every* time, so I suggest that we cache 
> > the user's decision in some way that's easily editable/readable by 
> > the user: either a dotfile in his home directory or a file in MT/.  
> > We could keep a mapping of human-readable names to random ids, and 
> > use that first when we're given a branch name by the user.
>
> that mapping, which you just described, is the 1:1 mapping I'm talking 
> about. I think it would be fine to keep it in your database, even send 
> it to another user as "advice" when you're syncing.

The problem I see there is that I'm also making this suggestion so that 
someone who works solely on a single project doesn't have to type 
"net.venge.monotone" very often -- he can simply alias it to "mt" if he 
wants (this is one reason why I think the data should do in a 
~/.dotfile, if possible).  Certainly these kinds of merely convenient 
aliases shouldn't be propagated?

I think there's a slightly bigger rift between our two concepts, but I 
think I'll start a new thread for that...more on that later! :)

Jeremy