Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: sha1sum doesn't match revision number

[Todd A. Jacobs]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 09:58:48PM +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:

>        % monotone cat manifest | grep vocab.cc
>        cebf734fb6a83a66665786e2c1486d4934137066  vocab.cc
>        % sha1sum vocab.cc
>        cebf734fb6a83a66665786e2c1486d4934137066

But the current manifest contains only the current file set, right? Not  
the list of all hashes of vocab.cc ever commited? If I understand the 
purpose of the manifest correctly, then searching it for an historical 
hash might not be very useful unless I checked each previous revision of 
the manifest until I found a match.

> As discussed previously, you can't go from that hash to a unique
> revision, because it may appear in many (and almost certainly does),
> if the contents of the file stays the same in some revisions.  

But that's okay. Generally speaking, one would be looking for the most 
recent revision in which a given version of the file exists. The use 
case you're pointing out, where it matters which revision a particular 
file was part of, gets us back to the earlier thread of keywords, and 
that wasn't where I was going this time around. :)

I think the more-general use case that monotone isn't currently 
addressing is the case where *loosely-associated* files (LaTeX 
documents, rc files, web sites, etc.) are being maintained in the same 
database, rather than tightly-coupled ones (such as the codebase for a 
single application).

> It may be useful to go from a hash to a list of all revisions which
> contain it (together with the filenames, since the same contents may
> be in files with different names, of course), but I don't think

I agree, that would be extremely useful.

--
Re-Interpreting Historic Miracles with SED #141: %s/water/wine/g