[Monotone-devel] Re: Normal usage scenario resulted in headless branch. Is it a bug or did I do something wrong?

[graydon hoare]

Eric Meyer wrote:
> Thank you, Graydon, that worked. What did I do that created the situation?
> The act of propagating from a vendor branch to a local branch is something
> that I'll probably do pretty regularly.

it happened because we are doing content addressing rather than 
historical context addressing (this will be fixed in the near future, 
say a couple months) and you managed to arrive at the same content 
before *and after* some sequence of changes. that caused a "loop in 
time", and monotone's code for such situations is far from good.

it isn't intrinsically related to the propagation from a vendor branch, 
that was just a coincidental cause. it could just as easily have 
happened from a different action.

anyways, as I said, we'll be moving away from building the history in 
terms of direct content addressing shortly. storage will still run in 
those terms, but historical (context) cycles will be impossible.

> How could you tell from the graph which node to delete? Why that one, and
> not 9dfefb%?

I just picked one for which the disconnection would remove the loop. no 
other good reason.

-graydon