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

[John S. Yates, Jr.]

"Bruce Stephens" <address@hidden> wrote in message
>
> 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.

I like [developer id, UTC of commit].  Assuming that developers do
not spoof their identities (hence cannot be committing into multiple
archives at precisely the same instant) this should be globally stable.
It has connotive value and UTC values are ordered.  It is true that
given such a [developer id, UTC of commit] pair it is impossible to
predict the next pair.  But then given a hash it is also impossible
to predict the next hash.

A virtue of these [developer id, UTC of commit] pairs is that they admit
to many obvious sugarings:

  developer missing => me
  distinct punctuation to distinguish UTC vs. local time
  fuzzy time matching
  etc

/john