Re: [Monotone-devel] newbie question - SHA1 vs serials

[K. Richard Pixley]

Timothy Brownawell wrote:

 This is why I suggested that the repository be named.  Presumably, the name
would be based on domain name, but the real point is that domain names
follow hierarchical delegation.
    

But how is this enforced?
  

The same way monotone currently enforces branch naming.

Which is to say, monotone already uses domain names on a conventional basis to provide uniqueness for branch names.

3. I have machine foo.bar.com - what to do about some unpleasant person who
decides to incorrectly name their machine foo.bar.com too?  (There are a
number of workarounds for this, each with advantages and disadvantages)
      

 You do nothing.  It's up to the administrator of bar.com to resolve this
collision.  Only one of you is actually authorized to use this name. 
Repository name doesn't necessarily change with IP or domain name change.
    

But people sometimes do things without being authorized.
  

And when they do, things break.  I believe this is a reasonable expectation.

 The point is two-fold:
 
 1) provide human readable visual ordering.  Since global ordering really
isn't possible, the only ordering that has any meaning is per-repository
ordering.  And that's what you're seeing.
    

Might be useful, but couldn't this be done just as well with a "show
ancestry" command?
  

Dunno.  Does monotone currently include information about which repository initially spawned a particular delta?

I didn't notice anything like that in the manual, but I could easily have overlooked it.

 2) providing unique id's.
    

But only if everyone behaves themselves.
  

Well, sure.  And if they don't, we stop listening to them.

The entire internet is a cooperative venture.  Just getting IP packets from one side of the world to the other involves a lot of people trusting a lot of other people to behave themselves.  If they didn't, the packets wouldn't flow.  (And sometimes they don't.)

 I think serials on named repositories do address these points.
    

This requires some sort of central authority to work. As I understand
it, one of the features of monotone is that there doesn't have to be
any such central authority.

Different types of central authority.

There is no single daemon running anywhere in the world whose lack of availability would stop this procedure from working.  In that sense, there is no central authority.

Monotone already relies conventionally on domain names for unique branch names.  In this sense, monotone already relies on a central authority.

If domain names and the attendant hierarchical delegation of naming authority are sufficiently decentralized and sufficiently unique for this purpose, I submit that the same mechanism is sufficiently unique and sufficiently decentralized to support repository naming.

--rich