[Monotone-devel] rosters status update

[Nathaniel Smith]

Rosters are getting _quite_ close to merge to mainline and the start
of dogfooding[0].  I completed the exhaustive (exhausting?) "mark"
tests today, plus a few more lifecycle and such tests, and am now
reasonably confident in the basic versioning core.

Critical to fix before rosters are usable:
  -- add a format version number to revisions and manifests.  For now
     we won't do anything with this, but we hope this is the last
     time we modify these formats before 1.0, and it may turn out to
     be useful then to have such a number around.
  -- it turns out that making "rosterify" migrate renames is actually
     quite straightforward to do.  therefore, we should add the code
     to do this, so renames are not lost when we rebuild revision
     graphs.
     -- write a test for this
  -- decide if/how attributes should be namespace-ified (see next
     email)

Would be nice:
  -- test for function equal_up_to_renumbering, which is depended on
     by the exhaustive marking tests
  -- tests for new merger, see bottom of
       http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/RostersTodo/MarkAndMergeTests
     these should be reasonably straightforward for anyone who read
     and understood the multi-*-merge paper.
  -- 'db check' can probably has a few tests missing; this needs
     review

There are a number of other known warts and rough edges, but as you
can see, all the things that block the dogfooding phase fit on one
page.  Really, if the first set of things get done, I think we can
merge, and if the second half haven't gotten done, well, we will just
suffer a bit until they do :-).

I'm heading home to my parents at the end of this week, for
holidays/last minute wedding planning/etc., and am not sure how much
time or computer access I will have between then and January 5 or so.  
Help accomplishing these last few things soon is therefore especially
appreciated :-).

As always, more information is available at:
  http://venge.net/monotone/wiki/RostersTodo
or by logging into IRC.

[0] "dogfooding": The plan is to roll a first release of rosters once
the necessities are in and we trust them enough.  At this point we
will rosterify monotone's own database, and start using the
roster-enabled monotone for development.  You probably _won't_ want to
upgrade to this.  We will warn strenously against it in the release
notes.  (Of course, some of you probably will anyway, bless your
hearts.)  After a month or so of daily use, we will presumably have
the main issues shaken out, and roll another release, that we will
actually people upgrade to.

Cheers,
-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould