[Monotone-devel] Re: thought on hierarchical branches

[Bruce Stephens]

Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> So, now I'm leaning very much back towards having branch names that
> are not leaves in the namespace -- because this hierarchical nesting
> is more expressive in this case.  Even if it does really confuse
> everyone used to svn/darcs/bzr/hg/..., with their branches as leaf
> URLs :-).
>
> Unless anyone has any ideas on a less confusing way to accomplish this
> goal?

No, I think you're right.

However, I suspect there are cases where less hierarchical naming
might be more convenient.

What might be useful is some way to store the relationship between
branches.

I'm thinking of the workflow which AccuRev appears to support (based
only on my reading of some of the documentation): that is, that often
you'll set up a branch nvm.foo that *is* hierarchically related to
nvm, and in that case it would be really useful if monotone knew that,
since it would make it possible to have some more concise commands for
propagating from nvm to nvm.foo and the like (since that's going to be
much more common than propagating from other branches, even though
that might be possible).

And if monotone knows about the relationships, then the actual branch
names ought to matter a bit less.

Maybe all this is waiting on being able to rename branches, and in
general the largely mysterious (to me, at least) management branch
ideas?