[Monotone-devel] re: cherrypicking on revctrl

[William Uther]

Hugo Cornelis wrote:

> Monotone uses a DAG to track ancestry.  The nodes in the DAG are
> annotated with SHA labels, identifying a revision.
>
> I was wondering if it would be possible somehow, to annotate the edges
> with SHAs that represent the changes between the nodes.
>
> Then, a pluck operation, that imports a change from a different
> branch, can register this operation in the _MTN directory, such that a
> subsequent commit annotates the resulting edge in the DAG with the SHA
> that is imported by the pluck, and the SHA that represents 'the total
> change minus the plucked change'.
>
> Afterwards, merges can possibly use the edge SHAs to increase the
> granularity of the merge and avoid conflicts, especially conflicts
> resulting from plucked changes.
>
> I am not sure if this is possible, but perhaps it is worth a thought
> and I decided to throw this out.

You're sort of describing Darcs.  The problem is that 'plucking'  
patches requires altering them.  That means that their hash changes.   
This is one of the things I like about DAG based revision control -  
you can hash things and be very careful about data security.  You  
could just use the original hash as a UUID I guess.  I'd rather try  
and record the information in the current structures if possible.

Cheers,

Will       :-}