[Monotone-devel] Too many heads? (was Re: newbie question - SHA1 vs serials)

[Bruce Stephens]

"K. Richard Pixley" <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Monotone has neither exclusive write-locks nor rigid access control.
> I'm concerned about the case where so many developers are
> committing, that the number of heads consistently rises.  Even if
> developers are required to merge first, the number of heads
> continues to rise.

Is that likely to happen?  Maybe I'm not familiar enough with how to
use monotone, but having multiple heads seems to me to be annoying
enough that I'd expect people to avoid them as much as possible.  

I'd certainly doubt that they'd last very long.  You can merge heads,
but that's about all you can do with them (as far as I know, anyway).
You can't propagate changes on one of these heads to your current one
(except by merging).  So I'd expect unmerged heads to be relatively
unusual.

And if you decide that things are diverging for a reason, you commit
one head onto a new branch.  And once you're on a branch you get to
propagate and things, so that becomes more maintainable.  I suspect
sometimes these branches might be of limited long-term value, so I
suspect there's an opportunity for throwaway branches which don't go
outside the current repository, but I don't know how feasible that
might be to implement safely.

But anyway, unless I'm missing something, multiple heads don't really
give enough functionality for them to be desirable to keep for very
long, and it's fairly easy to convert them into proper branches if you
don't want to merge them.