Re: [Monotone-devel] thought on hierarchical branches

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 01:35:43PM +0200, Zbynek Winkler wrote:
>      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 :-).
> 
>    I do not think this is true for hg. You can easily branch into the same
>    space. I've just tried something along the lines of
> 
>    hg init .
>    hg clone . subbranch
>    echo "Hey" > fff
>    hg st
>    ? ffff
>    hg add ffff
>    hg ci
>    cd subbranch
>    hg pull
> 
>    Works just fine. I can pull either . or ./subbranch. Unless you meant
>    something else?

No, that's what I meant.  Thanks for the comment.

What happens if mainline happens to contain a file name "subbranch"?

Does looking at this scheme make you nauseous from the way it violates
the expectation baked into hg's model that a branch location contains
the files in that branch, not other branches?

>      Unless anyone has any ideas on a less confusing way to accomplish this
>      goal?
> 
>    Maybe branch renaming could help? When branching of the trunk create a
>    leave. Afterwords rename the .roster-no-hash to .roster-no-hash/trunk and
>    create another named .roster-no-hash/new-crazy-idea?

Hmm, good point -- branch renaming is already baked into this scheme
anyway.  This seems a little elaborate to go through all the time,
though; I worry a lot about defaults because they're what tends to
guide what people end up doing in the common case.  A possibility that
no-one thinks of isn't so useful; a possibility that will make users's
lives easier should be nudged towards their awareness...

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"The problem...is that sets have a very limited range of
activities -- they can't carry pianos, for example, nor drink
beer."