Re: [Monotone-devel] Proposal for human readable revision IDs

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 10:36:28AM +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Thomas Haas <address@hidden> writes:
> > Additionally, or alternatively, a different, persistent
> > representation of the various identifiers could ease the use of
> > monotone. E.g.  revisions could be counted as in sub-version or
> > monotone limit itself to display identifiers as short as possible,
> > while still unique (the result could be fed into monotone complete
> > to get the full identifier).
> 
> A difficulty with that is that these things would then not be
> permanent.  At present the selector "aa0" is unique for the database
> of venge.net that I have, but that won't always be so.  So if I cut
> and paste "aa0" and store it somewhere, then that's not going to work;
> similarly, if I email that revision to someone, then that may well not
> be unique for the recipient.

This can be avoided by having a hard-coded minimum length -- e.g.,
mercurial always prints 12 hex digits.  That's less of an eyeful,
while still being unique in normal use (i.e., unless very unlucky, or
someone creates intentional collisions).  Even if such a id does go
non-unique, one can probably figure out which of the $SMALLNUM
possibilities was intended from context...

-- Nathaniel

-- 
.i dei jitfa fanmo xatra