[Monotone-devel] Re: thought on hierarchical branches

[Steven Grimm]

> So, I was leaning towards something more like svn
>   trunk
>   branch/foo
> etc.
>   

That's one of the things that's broken about Subversion (or at least 
most people's use of it) in my opinion. I think that there should be no 
distinction other than local naming conventions between a "trunk" and a 
"branch". BitKeeper, for example, gets this exactly right, though it 
obviously takes a very different approach to branch storage than Monotone.

Monotone should indeed remember what the parent of a particular branch 
is, as others have mentioned, if only to allow convenient defaults for 
pushing/pulling changes from a common integration branch (which will be 
a very common operation.) But you should be able to reparent any branch 
at any time, which to me means the branch name should not represent its 
place in the hierarchy at all.

For example, I might have a branch "com.foo.newfeature1". Initially that 
branch was derived from "com.foo.release16". Now my schedule slips and I 
won't make it into that release. I should be able to reparent my branch 
under "com.foo.release17" and not change anything else. In particular, 
other people should be able to continue to refer to my branch by its 
functional name, not by a name that implies which release it's part of. 
Otherwise I will have to make sure everyone else knows when I change my 
parent.

Of course, for sites that *do* want hierarchical names that map to a 
branch hierarchy, there's nothing to stop them from establishing a local 
naming convention.

-Steve