[Monotone-devel] Re: Poll: another possible problem migrating to rosters

[Tom Koelman]

>>  - Because currently there is no sane way to declare a certain branch
>>    dead, we created a new branch from scratch called "dead" to which
>>    we propagate branches that we want to get rid of.
>
> Hrm, I can think of lots of ways to put some sort of mark on a branch;
> make up a magic cert you stick on the branch head, for instance.
> Which doesn't give you any particular built-in tool support, but
> AFAICT neither does merging to a special dead branch...  Why did you
> choose to do it this way instead of some other?

Somewhat simplified, we have a main branch that we want to have one
head at all times. If someone is going to develop, a named branch is
split of from this main branch. Sometimes these split off branches are
almost trivial, sometimes they exists for weeks. When work on a branch
is done, it is propagated back to main.

The nice thing about this, is that just listing all leaves gives an
overview off all unfished work. Typically we do a lot of different
things at the same time (oh, and we have more than one main branch),
so this is a good thing to be able to do.

However, we do make mistakes. For several reasons we can end up with a
branch off of main that is not going to be propagated back. But it
keeps on existing as a branch with a head. If we propagate it to the
dead branch, it doesn't have a head anymore, so it doesn't get listed
by "monotone automate leaves".

We don't particularly like the solution but for now it works, sort
of.

Some sort of magic cert on the branch head would be way nicer.

More general and maybe less messy, would be a adding an "dead"
certificate to certain revisions. If these certificates would
be adhered to by netsync as well, this would fix another matter as
well: accidental synching of revisions that you didn't want to leave
your computer in the first place, and now can't get rid of anymore.

Regards,
Tom Koelman