[Monotone-devel] responses to some IRC discussion of 'automate'

[Nathaniel Smith]

<CIA-2> address@hidden net.venge.monotone *
   r7db642aec3cbe7051e7ad8a75066503c74241f7b / (10 files): (log message
   trimmed)
<CIA-2> 2006-08-06 Thomas Moschny <address@hidden>
<CIA-2>  Make the block size for automate stdio configurable:

Why should automate stdio block size be configurable?

<tommyd> again back to erase_anchestors: now, what I don't understand is
  all the further processing of this map... if I want to get all
  revisions which are not an anchestor, can't I do this by simply
  querying "SELECT r1.child FROM revision_ancestry r1 LEFT JOIN
  revision_anchestry r2 ON r1.child=r2.parent WHERE r2.parent IS NULL" ?

It looks like you basically figured this out -- the important thing to
notice is the difference between "parent/child" and
"ancestor/descendent".  If you have A -> B -> C, then A is an ancestor
of C, but it is not a parent of C.  We try to be careful about these
two words, since the difference really is important :-).

<tommyd> its just that I'd like to expand the format of autmate branches
  a bit and display the revision ids of the head revisions along to the
  branch's name, and if the branch is not merged, handle that
  accordingly by displaying all head revisions and their other certs

I don't much like this idea at all.  If someone wants that extra
information, they can already get it with "automate heads" or even
"automate select".  Getting that extra information is an extra
cost, and we should make our interfaces orthogonal, so that each
consumer pays only for the information that they request.  (I.e., what
do I do if I really _do_ just want the branch names?)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
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