[Monotone-devel] Re: Future of monotone

[Graydon Hoare]

Thomas Moschny wrote:
> On Monday 28 January 2008, Graydon Hoare wrote:
> > I think it's a good branch as they go in this sort of thing. I just ran
> > out of interest.
>
> Sorry to hear that, but that's life, it seems.
>
> > It contains a variety of interrelated new code. Anyone 
> > else is welcome to pick it up of course.
>
> > The changes are, primarily: [...]
> >    - a sketch of the long-planned upgrade to certificates
>
> Can you explain that a bit? Is this related to the idea of creating combined 
> certs consisting of a author/date/msg/branch tuple?

Yes, though there was a huge following thread in which most of the 
issues were probed by others here :)

Pretty much my reasoning was:

  - We need a new sort of 'branch' cert that points to a symbolic branch
    ID rather than a string branch name.

  - The 'branch' cert is really a 'commit' or 'approve' cert, so we
    might as well gain some semantic clarity and cut down the amount of
    crypto overhead (signatures are not small) by bundling the
    commit/approve date, author(s), and comment fields. Of course these
    would be separate from signing key ID and signing date. Authors
    don't even need to be formally identified by keys. They can be
    strings.

  - It'd be good to shove a version number and/or algorithm ID in there
    for vague hand-wavey future proofing. Not that one can ever be safe
    from the future.

Perhaps this is embarrassing, but I thought 'suspend' certs had to do 
with shutting down branches, and all the possible policy-branch designs 
(even the most minimal) have a concept of a branch lifecycle, with a 
revivable 'dormant'/'active' state and a sticky 'revoked' state.

-Graydon