Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: [HACKERS] SCMS question

[William Uther]

On 23/02/2007, at 8:47 AM, Hugo Cornelis wrote:

> On 2/22/07, William Uther <address@hidden> wrote:
> > $Id:$ in the repository.  It is expanded again on checkout.  This not
> > only helps with checksumming, but also makes sure that there are no
> > spurious changes between revisions.
> >
> > Of course, you want to keep this optional and disabled by default.
> > Subversion uses attributes to turn on specific keywords for specific
> > files.
>
> What I currently do is I expand / remove keywords manually with a perl
> script.  In a separate configuration file, there is a list of files to
> search for keywords and a list of keywords with their expansion.
>
> It would be nice if monotone has the right hooks to automate this
> process, (just a matter of technical implementation I guess).  When
> using scripts and hooks, monotone has nothing to do anymore with
> keyword expansion, simplifying the implementation.

I agree with the sentiment behind this idea: make monotone do  
versioning, and have other programs take care of automatic stuff.

The problem is in detecting if a file has changed.  If you're using  
compressed keywords in the database then manual expansion of those  
keywords causes monotone to think the file has changed.  If you're  
not using compressed keywords in the database then you can do some  
keywords (e.g. Date, Last Author, Branch, RepositoryURI), but not  
others (e.g. Revision, Log), as was pointed out by a previous post.

Given monotone's unwieldy revision ids, Revision is possibly not so  
useful anyway, and the Log keyword was always a terrible idea :).   
All you really need to do is redefine Id from <FileName, Revision,  
Date, Author> to <FileName, Branch, Date, Author> and you'd could get  
most functionality with manual expansion.

Be well,

Will        :-}