Re: [Monotone-devel] Manifest Comments

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

[ I note that in this ML, it's not common to 'Reply To All' and thus CC 
to the sender. I'm not quite used to that, sorry. Sending to just the 
mailing list seems to be the way it works over here, right? ]

Not so long ago, I, myself have written wrote:
> I'll check that documentation out...

Right, there Christof Petig has written in cvs_mtn/CVS_prot, at the very 
bottom:

=========== attributes ==============
"" "cvs:root" "cvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome" (Root)
"" "cvs:module" "glade--" (?Repository)
["" "cvs:path" "glade--" (only if different from module)]
"" "cvs:branch" "STABLE" (tag)

["po" "cvs:path" "glade--/po"]

"README" "cvs:revision" "1.15"
["README" "cvs:keywords" "-kb" (only if different from -kk)]
"README" "cvs:sha1" "da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709"
        (or only first 4/6 chars)

So, you are adding the sha1 hash of the *file* (as it was in CVS) as an 
attribute. (Adding only the first 4/6 chars seems to lead to problems, 
if you ask me. Or at least some overhead for rechecking...)

What is '-kb' or '-kk' supposed to mean? And "cvs:revision" does not 
store: "1.1 > 1.2 > ... > 1.14 > 1.15" but only "1.15". I must have 
misunderstood before. I assume the cvs:root and cvs:module attributes 
get only added to the root directory. What is cvs:path supposed to 
track? Why do you add cvs:branch? In monotone we have certs to store 
branch information.

Please elaborate on that attribute storage format.

IMO, storing the SHA1 hash of the original file is a work around. You 
already have that hash in the manifest in the revision which equals an 
imported one. I'd vote for implementing either 'vanishing attributes' or 
'manifest comments' or something instead of doing work arounds.

( And, if you have to store an SHA1 hash (which changes very often) for 
every file, that will probably come close to using certs, in terms of 
storage used, no? Because Delta-compression won't help much for hashes.)

Regards

Markus