Re: [Monotone-devel] Keyword substitution?

[Brian Campbell]

How can you insert revision IDs into a file when the revision ID is  
based on the SHA-1 hash of the file? Inserting the revision ID into  
the file will change the contents of that file, which changes its  
SHA-1 hash, which gives it a new revision.

I suppose, if you really felt that keyword substitution was a good  
idea (I don't), you could always store a canonical form of each  
keyword (for instance $Rev$), and have it substituted on checkout,  
and canonicalized on commits, like we do if you turn on line ending  
conversion. That seems a little odd, though, and I'm just not  
convinced that keywords are a good idea.

For the case that was brought up earlier to support keywords, that of  
distributing files outside of monotone and being able to refer to  
what revision of the files you're using, there are several solutions.  
The main one would be to track version numbers in a traditional way,  
assigning a version number to various releases of your software and  
adding a tag in monotone so you can find the revision that  
corresponds to that particular version. If you need a finer  
granularity than that, you can always just get the SHA-1 hash of the  
file, and use "monotone cat file <id>" to get that version of the  
file out of monotone. Maybe we should have a command to find out what  
revisions a particular file ID appears in.