Re: [Monotone-devel] resolving name conflicts; file suturing vs drop

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

William Uther wrote:
> I can't see an easy way to implement this without a graveyard.  If you're
> going to implement a graveyard, then I'd get rid of DieDieDie merge first.

Hm.. I don't see what file resurrection has to do with suturing. Of 
course, resurrection would help the user to revert from erroneously 
sutured files. But that's the point of it.

> You could then implement the 'drop one side' approximation to a suture, and
> know that DieDieDie merge wont kill you.

To be symmetric, suturing will have to drop both source files and create 
a new destination node. Only that way you can resurrect any of the two 
files later on, for example.

I'm thinking of suturing as an atomic "delete two, add one" operation.

> Once you have a graveyard, appending information to dead nodes, such as
> "this node was merged into this other node" would make future merges 
> easier.

Hm.. maybe you need to outline your graveyard concept a little better. 
Last I've heard about file resurrection, we should simply add a boolean 
flag for alive or dead. That hardly carries any extra information, but 
could be merged the same as other attributes.

Regards

Markus