Re: [Monotone-devel] thought on hierarchical branches

[Thomas Keller]

Nathaniel Smith schrieb:
> The problem with a trunk-next-to-branches scheme is that there's
> nowhere to put branches-of-branches.  This branch off mainline now has
> two branches off it, and I'll probably end up putting one back to the
> first branch, then pull the result into the second branch, etc...
> branches-of-branches are a deeply Right thing to want, and I wonder
> how workflow in other systems suffers from not having any natural way
> to talk about this.

Well, I think I once thought about such a possibility myself and 
wondered if the introduction of "local" branches would be useful for 
that, which would allow things like "private forks". Subbranches would 
still live side by side with the main branch, but wouldn't be 
fetchable/commitable by someone else other than the original branch 
author. (Sure, this could already be accomplished by using restrictions 
via Lua hooks somehow, but this way private branches wouldn't even be 
visible by somebody else, so they also would not visually "pollute" the 
global branch namespace...)

I'm unsure if "real" subbranches, branches which are only visible if a 
user is inside a parent branch, can be implemented in any nice way, 
since I think this would bring in more complexity (code wise and user 
wise) than it would solve.

Thomas.

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