[Monotone-devel] Re: Using monotone in a team

[Oren Ben-Kiki]

On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 01:49 +0000, Boris wrote:
> Hugo Cornelis wrote:
> > Well, what I really want to do is have a mechanism that automatically
> > distributes the necessary hooks from one central point.  For sure the
> > members of the same team need the same trust policies, local
> > alterations not allowed.  So if you want to join the team, you first
> > have to synchronize the trust policies.  This does not preclude simple
> > cloning for private work.  Perhaps the right question is, does this
> > layer belong to monotone or not ?
> 
> I guess it does not belong to monotone. As you even want to forbid 
> developers to change trust policies I think a distributed revision control 
> system is not what you want. What monotone does is copying data between 
> databases. Once it is there revisions can be combined flexibly. And how they 
> are combined depends on the local configuration (the hook functions). At 
> least that's my understanding so far (as usual without any warranties ;).

Sounds strange to me. I'd expect the trust policy and (all? some?) of
the hooks to be part of the data that monotone allows copying between
the databases.

This raises some issues with merging branches - you'd want to merge just
the code changes, and not necessarily the policy changes. Also some
hooks depend on the developer environment (e.g. the messy line-ending
issue), while others may need be shared by all developers (e.g., simple
pre-commit verifications). So it may be necessary to have that
distinction be explicit in the system somehow.

Tricky as this may be to get right, this is something you'd expect every
distributed version control system to address somehow...

Oren Ben-Kiki