Re: [Monotone-devel] beginner questions

[Nico -telmich- Schottelius]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge [Fri, May 28, 2004 at 05:15:38PM -0700]:
> [versioning: sha1 vs. something else]
> This is true, but Zbigniew's question is a good one - the SHA1 hashes
> are a big pain to use, and will be forever turning people off.

I don't really think so. The only useful thing I say is
calling a specific hash a version, for releases.

9283d... is then monotone-0.13 for instance.

> I know
> why they're there and what they're for, but I don't like to use them,
> even in abbreviated form.  The fact that they convey no information
> about the files and versions to me, the user, makes them very hard to
> work with - I can't easily remember that df2834* is the version before
> 9283d* and after 1238b* without noting it to myself explicitly, whereas
> it's implicit in 1.2, 1.3 and 1.1.  When I'm doing merges and so on, I
> have usually enough mental state to keep track of without this added
> complication.

I don't really think that makes sense.
Although working with numbers may be a bit easier for people,
everybody who understood the way monotone works will see that
identifying by hash makes most sense.

> They are, of course, fundamental to Monotone's operation, but couldn't
> Monotone generate simple version numbers for local use?

Imho this would make much more complicated and confuse people.

If there is really a problem with using sha1-hashes as identification
than we have a documentation problem.

Nico

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