Re: [Monotone-devel] The dark side of content addressing

[Jon Bright]

Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:
> I read through your examples, and intuition said "salt to first
> revision!" before I came to the paragraph where you said exactly
> that.  I trust my intuition on this, so the only thing I can say is
> "go ahead".

My intuition said that too - but then I remembered the big discussion 
about Graydon not liking GUIDs, back when we were originally discussing 
revisions.  An alternative, which sticks with a kind of 
content-basedness, might be to take the hash of the branch name.

Upside: no reliance on availability and reliability of entropy.
Downside: still content based, you get the same problem if Alice and Bob 
name their branches the same way.

Introducing this kind of randomness might also have some implications 
for test repeatability?

Overall, I can't immediately think of any security problems with the 
current behaviour -- and by implication, no problems of the 
branch-name-based-initial-revision-hash occur to me either.  Might using 
the hash of the branch name be a better way to go?

--
Jon Bright
Silicon Circus Ltd.
http://www.siliconcircus.com