Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: [ANNOUNCE] monotone 0.21 released

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 12:22:05PM +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
> There is just one problem. When you "sync" a number of
> branches which contain an --excluded one too, then monotone
> will abort with an error:
> 
>   protocol error while processing peer localhost:
>     'received network error: access to branch 'foo.bar' denied by server
> 
> That behavior forces you to specify all --excluded branches
> on the command line every time you sync, and that's pretty
> uncomfortable. (Default patterns don't help me when I have
> to sync to different servers with different configurations.)
> 
> Would it be possible to have monotone just ignore the
> branches in question? Possibly after issuing a warning, like
> previous versions did?

Hmm, well, the situation is a bit tricky, because the server and
client have to agree on what they're syncing, or else things become
inefficient.  The merkle tree set synchronization algorithm has costs
that grow with the size of the difference between the two sets; so
setting up two sets with lots of irrelevant differences makes your
performance really bad for no reason.

In principle we could come up with some way to make this magically
work, like if the server replies saying "yeah, yeah, I know what you
want, here, this is what you're getting" and the client builds its
tries based on that.  I'm a little dubious about this from the design
point of view; it feels rather magic -- if I ask for one thing, and
silently get something else instead, that's confusing!

Can you explain some more about your situation?  Why do you have lots
of servers?  Why do they all have different --exclude patterns?  Why
are you pulling all them into the same db?  Maybe there's some other
change that would make you even happier :-)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"But suppose I am not willing to claim that.  For in fact pianos
are heavy, and very few persons can carry a piano all by themselves."