Re: [Monotone-devel] Branch names

[Derek Scherger]

Matthew A. Nicholson wrote:

> No idea what you mean by branch globbing.  I was just wondering if using 

There's been some talk of replacing the "collection" concept with 
something a bit more flexible.

A collection is is really just a branch name prefix, the 
net.venge.monotone collection includes the 
net.venge.monotone.restrictions branch only because 
"net.venge.monotone.restrictions" starts with "net.venge.monotone".

One problem with this is that if you're serving net.venge.monotone the 
only option I may have is to pull the entire collection, even if I'm not 
interested in most of the branches in that collection.

From a serving point of view, you might want to serve only some of the 
branches starting with that prefix.

The idea of allowing something such as shell-like wildcard globbing of 
branch names has been tossed around a bit, although I think there are a 
few different issues with this as well.

The basic idea is that rather than doing a string prefix match something 
like a shell glob or regex match would be done instead to see if a 
particular branch is included. So to serve the entire net.venge.monotone 
collection as it is now, would require serving net.venge.monotone* and 
pulling net.venge.monotone would fetch only the main branch. To get the 
sub-branches would require pulling net.venge.monotone* or some such.

> that style of branch name would cause any problems.

I think it should basically work fine, but some tests in a throw away 
database are probably in order to make sure. Play around with it if you 
can, and please report back with any interesting findings.

Cheers,
Derek