Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Branch Naming

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 02:33:50AM +0100, Peter Simons wrote:
> Nathaniel Smith writes:
> 
>  > I'd actually at that point like to see Monotone _enforce_
>  > the requirement of having something that looks like
>  > <host>/<branch> for branch names [...].
> 
> I see why having Monotone enforce a policy looks like a good
> idea, but I am not sure it is. Not every branch I have is
> necessarily exported to the world. Actually, the vast
> majority my branches is _not_ public. Hence, world-wide
> uniqueness is for the most part completely irrelevant to me.

That's not quite true.  Can you guarantee that you will never, ever,
at any point in the future, want to share some bit of software
descended from your current software with any other person?  Even
if you think you probably won't want to, and you _do_ guess correctly,
then the next person down probably will guess wrong.

Note also that in just the tiny bit of usage we've had, there's
already a accidentally leaked-out "private" branch in the public
Monotone repository.  (Sorry to pick on you Matt ;-); but if people
make mistakes with software, that's usually a bug in the software!)

Much better just to make sure that private namespaces are still
globally unique.

> In addition to that, I am generally opposed to arbitrary
> limitations in software unless they are _technically_
> necessary. Software should do what the user wants, not the
> other way round. ;-)

Oh, definitely.  And nothing's stopping you from putting garbage in
the hostname field or even breaking these rules (after all, there's
always 'db execute' ;-)).  But there are very good technical reasons
to want branch names to really be unique.  And since we can't achieve
that without some help from the users, we should make our UI encourage
the users to do the right thing.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
The Universe may  /  Be as large as they say
But it wouldn't be missed  /  If it didn't exist.
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