Re: [Monotone-devel] thought on hierarchical branches

[Ethan Blanton]

Nathaniel Smith spake unto us the following wisdom:
> In particular, I was sort of leaning towards saying that actual
> branches should be leaves -- if we follow the scheme we use now, we'd
> have branches
>   monotone
>   monotone/foo
>   monotone/bar
> etc., and that seems confusing when these are actually directories in
> a filesystem.  So, I was leaning towards something more like svn
>   trunk
>   branch/foo
> etc.

The former, however, is *very* appropriate for expressing branch
relationships under many (most?) work flow scenarios, as branches
really do form trees with parents, children, and siblings.  I found
the monotone branch naming convention intuitive the first time I saw
it, whereas svn (per your example) is much less so.  I would be
inclined to say that, if the policy control mechanism is confusing
with hierarchical branches, it is the mechanism which should be
revisited and not the branch naming convention.

That said, obviously people figure out svn.

[snip]
> 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 :-).

So ... agreed.  :-)

Ethan

-- 
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws [that have no remedy
for evils].  They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.
                -- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764

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