[Monotone-devel] Re: Branch Naming

[Peter Simons]

Nathaniel Smith writes:

 > Can you guarantee that you will never, ever, at any point
 > in the future, want to share some bit of software
 > descended from your current software with any other
 > person?

Yes, because the data is proprietary and, actually, pretty
secret. Whoever is supposed to have that will certainly use
the same naming scheme I do. Collisions are really not an
issue.

Even if I wanted to release a private branch to the public,
I would simply "propagate" the data from my private branch
to the public one. That's, in fact, what I have been doing
for quite a while now: I start development in "priv.foo",
and once I want to release it, I propagate to "to.cryp.foo".
It allows me more fine-grained control over what is publicly
available already and what is not yet. Plus, my private
branch often looks quite different from the public one.


 > Much better just to make sure that private namespaces are
 > still globally unique.

I can't help it, but it feels wrong to me. Monotone
shouldn't care how I call my branches. I know better than
the software does.


 > nothing's stopping you from putting garbage in the
 > hostname field or even breaking these rules [...].

Your statement sums up perfectly why I think there will
probably _never_ be any de-central naming scheme that
guarantees world-wide uniqueness. ;-)

What's stopping me from creating a branch called
"net.venge.monotone" and committed lots of pictures of naked
women into it? What exactly does "unique" mean in that
context?

Peter