[Monotone-devel] Re: Certificates for files

[Bruce Stephens]

Thomas Haas <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> As mentioned in my initial posting I consider this a work-around.
> However, if certs only exit for revisions (And not for files) it is
> the way to go.

Probably I'm misunderstand what you're trying to do.  The closest I
can get is that you want to say something about a specific version of
a file in the context of a revision (perhaps more generally: a
specific version of a file for a branch, or for a "release" indicated
in some way).  

I wouldn't have thought it would be useful to mark a version of a file
(actually as Nathaniel commented, the contents of the file, which
doesn't include its name or anything) without connecting that to
something else.  And if the "something else" can be a revision, then
you could use a revision cert.

Overall I'm not sure why using a revision cert is a workaround rather
than the right thing to use.  For checking a release, you can look at
the certs attached to the revision and make sure they're all there,
for example.

I could imagine you might want to attach a cert to a particular file
(you might want to make "README" as a file that needs a specific kind
of check before making a release).  What used to be file certs don't
seem right for that.  

Technically I imagine that would be possible, if files have a
permanent identity as proposed by Nathaniel recently, it might be
possible to expose that sufficiently to attach certs to them.  File
attrs could be done like that, I guess?  On the other hand, you'd
probably want them to be versionable, so that wouldn't work well.

How about using file attributes for what you want, rather than certs?