[Monotone-devel] Re: Fwd: Re: FreeBSD's requirements for its future VCS

[Bruce Stephens]

"Zack Weinberg" <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> So this is not a feature that we want to have to spend a lot of
> developer time on, because it's so rarely needed; but it is a
> feature that we want to put enough thought into that we can say it
> works for sure.  Apropos, your suggestion seems dreadfully
> complicated to implement and not as "sure" as someone looking down
> the barrel of a court order might want.

I thought I was more or less translating what I imagine git does.

Monotone's a little different, in that it's ancestry that matters
rather than branches, but the principle's the same: you want to rebase
all the descendents of a revision to another revision, and then you
want to make it straightforward for that operation to spread through
the network of repositories.  (Being a distributed system, that's not
something you can enforce, however.)

I'm not sure how you'd get rid of a file.  I guess you have to take
the revision that added it, commit another one that doesn't add it,
then rebase all its descendents?

(And "pluck" and just applying patches would presumably be issues.
But that kind of thing will be a problem for any system: at some point
you have to give up technical solutions and look at what people have
done to the repository.)