[Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[Bruce Stephens]

Logan Sackette <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> But why can't MT's hash values be like a UUID or GUID and we have
> simple version reference like CC?  Something like:
>
> <VC object>/<branch>/<version number> would map to a hash value.
> Sure, there will have to be a database mapping versions on a branch
> to a hash value.
>
> diff blah.c/my_branch/3 blah.c/your_branch/latest

Because in monotone there's no suitable database.  Each repository has
a graph of revisions (now a DAG), but each such DAG is just a partial
view of an unknown global DAG.  

Giving stable globally usable names to things in such distributed
systems isn't impossible (Arch has one approach, X.500 another), but
I'm not sure what would be suitable for monotone.  My guess is that a
good usable solution is likely to turn out to be local names which
aren't stable (i.e., they reflect the current local notion of
revisions), together with stable IDs which are equivalent to hashes.