[Monotone-devel] Re: Certificates on certificates?

[Bruce Stephens]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker <address@hidden> writes:

> In message <address@hidden> on Sun, 20 Nov 2005 20:57:53 +0100, Tom Koelman 
> <address@hidden> said:
>
> tkoelman> an idea that I just got is this: wouldn't it be nice to be
> tkoelman> able to attach certificates to certificates?
>
> My brain just went into an endless loop thinking about it.  Gotta go
> for repairs :-).
>
> Seriously, it kind of sounds like a good idea, but I wonder how far we
> should go with that, as it seems it could be generalised to madness,
> and I'm not sure we should do that.

I wonder how much functionality can just be done using revision
certificates.  For example, presumably the get_revision_cert_trust
example in the manual (which uses prehistoric "ancestry" certificates)
translates directly to branch certificates.  So one reinforces a
branch certificate by creating another one.

There are cases where that's not enough.  I might want to correct a
changelog certificate, and in that case I'd want to point at the one I
want to supercede, I guess.  I think that's still basically a
conventional revision certificate, though.  

Maybe there are some negative cases, where I want to say that a
specific branch certificate is wrong.  I suspect that kind of thing
could be done using some convention (maybe a branch certificate with
value "!net.venge.monotone" cancels one with "net.venge.monotone" or
something).

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