[Monotone-devel] deleting branches, keys, etc.

[Derek Scherger]

Having messed up one too many times and committed something to the wrong branch, 
I was thinking that I might have a go at adding commands for things like 
deleting certs and keys. Coming up with the raw sql to delete these things is a 
bit cumbersome.

Such commands will probably need appropriate warnings in the documentation that 
they may be rather temporary if the database has been distributed. The point of 
them seems to be more about fixing problems before distributing them I think.

Of course naming commands is always fun. For removing certs how about something 
like

        $ monotone uncert ID CERTNAME

which would be quite similar to the corresponding cert creation command.
Alternatively, perhaps

        $ monotone cert add ID CERTNAME
        $ monotone cert del ID CERTNAME (or delete,drop,remove)

or, along the lines of the ls commands

        $ monotone rm cert ID CERTNAME

although reproducing a shell like set of commands (ls, rm, etc.) doesn't seem 
great.

I can't think of a particularly good converse for the genkey command. Maybe

        $ monotone create key
        $ monotone remove key
        $ monotone create cert
        $ monotone remove cert

would be better? Public key, private key?

Hmm... removing keys that have signed certs seems like it might be bad.

Is there any need for deleting an entire branch? i.e. not just the branch cert 
on one manifest but all branch certs with some particular value? An easy way of 
renaming a branch might be nice too.

I noticed the idea of an fsck command mentioned on savannah, which seems like a 
good one. In addition to checking hash values what about checking for things like

        - file versions that don't appear in any manifest
        - manifests without branch certs
        - manifests without other certs (author, changelog, date)
        - certs signed with unknown keys

although I'm not sure what you might do after finding such things. Deleting 
files and manifests would probably be kinda bad.

And here I thought this might be easy...
--
Cheers,
Derek