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

[graydon hoare]

Christof Petig wrote:
...
> 4. release with as much epoch support as is absolutely needed and
> replace preliminary epoch support by a new scheme [branch-as-ID is a
> good idea (how to compute that ID?); distributed renaming certs (see my
> post on deleting/changing certs for details) or any other idea we work
> out after 0.17].

yeah. having talked about this in some detail on IRC today, I think 
we've come to accept that this space consists of a few too many issues 
to try lumping them all into one, as seemed appealing last night. the 
issues are (at least):

  - sometimes you want to be able to globally rename a branch. this is
    sort of possible-ish already, by just making a new branch and
    telling everyone to stop using the old one, then flushing the old
    one out of the db as required. but it's never likely to be globally
    possible because people might just ignore you. distributed systems
    are like that. we could write some commands to help with the current
    setup, without changing branches to a 2-level structure.

  - sometimes you want "short names" like "main" or "dev" for your
    branches, but those are really between you and monotone. a UI thing.
    we can tack that on way up in the command line processing part. the
    "short names" aren't really useful between databases anyways.

  - sometimes you have a need to isolate two branches from one another
    even though they have the same name. this is what epochs were
    intended to do. they're simple and only address this one problem,
    but have no extra implications. we're a good ways into this work,
    and it seems possible to finish quickly (couple days) and get on
    with releasing 0.17.

so I think we'll be going with christof's preference this time: finish 
the epochs stuff and release 0.17 builds containing it, asap.

-graydon