Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: branch aliases

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 10:02:42PM +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:
> >   -- firstly, assume we switch to a "host/branch/subbranch" style of
> >      branch naming; I think one of the things that actually did come
> >      out of the Huge Thread Of Doom was some rough consensus that this
> >      would actually be a good idea anyway.
> 
> Wouldn't that particular syntax interfere with selectors?

Yeah, oh well, it's not hard to change the selector separator
character.  And "/" is a much more natural hierarchy marker than set
intersection marker.

> Also (depending on how it's done) to be veering towards the rigidity
> of Arch's <archive>/<category>--<branch>--<version>, and while there
> are perfectly good arguments in favour of that kind of uniformity many
> people don't like it (and it's not at all clear that it's useful, or
> ever will be).

Not really.  This is just a trivial syntactic change --
"com.foo.branch.subbranch" -> "foo.com/branch/subbranch".

We do want to (continue to) strongly encourage people to put hostnames
into their branch names; uniqueness is important in a system where
anyone can, at any point, sync their database with any other
project's.  I don't see any need to impose policy beyond that (not
that we can even really impose that); I'm happy to let projects make
their own decisions...

(Probably be a good idea to write some "best practices" type docs at
some point; managing stable namespaces is hard.
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI has some nice stuff on this
general problem, in the second half...)

> > Simple, effective, good?
> 
> I think so.  It might still be nice to be able to exchange these
> aliases and version them, but I'm not sure that that's important
> enough to worry about for a first cut.

Well, the point is to make something very simple, that's purely
syntactic sugar in the UI.  I really don't see what we'd gain by
versioning these...

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.
  -- Woody Allen