[Monotone-devel] Re: date certs on net.venge.monotone

[Lapo Luchini]

Markus Wanner wrote:
>> to better provide the functionality of letting people
>> know that someone else's clock that they can't fix is broken.
> 
> The main motivation is making dates cert information more reliable. But
> it looks like that's not considered "core functionality" of monotone.

I think Nathaniel's point of "you can't fix" is important… let's
exemplify it:

day 1. user NTP commits with correct date 2008-10-24
day 2. user MadTime commits with incorrect date 2009-10-25
   (and you can do nothing about it, as it's incorrect in the future,
   so the check you propose would happily pass)
day 3. user NTP tries to commit with correct date 2008-10-26
   gets a warning he can do nothing about as it wasn't his fault really

Being user NTP I would in fact be bothered by that warning… if we could
devise a way to warn user Madtime and not user NTP, I'd happily choose
for it, but I can't see a way myself…

OK, in my exaggerated +1year case you could use a "are you sure to
commit on a 1-year-old branch" warning, but in more mundane +1day cases
that wouldn't be nice at all.

-- 
Lapo Luchini - http://lapo.it/

“When two trains approach each other at a crossing, both shall come to a
full stop and neither shall start up again until the other has gone.”
(Kansas State Legislature)