Re: [Monotone-devel] Meta-policy proposal

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 03:59:08PM -0700, Rob Schoening wrote:
>    Does monotone have a concept of a "project"?  I didn't think it did, other
>    than by convention.
> 
>    I'm not necessarily saying that it should, but since a lot of this
>    use-case discussion revolves around authorization issues in the lifecycle
>    of a project, it does beg the question somewhat.

Some of the things we've experienced that make us think adding a
"project" concept is a good idea:
  -- Shared trust rules require some sort of "group of branches" unit
     (the current discussion).
  -- In 99% of cases, you want "a project" to be the unit you sync on.
     In current usage, people treat "net.venge.monotone*" in this
     manner.  (Obviously it's useful to be able to sync only a subset
     of a project too, but that should be something you have to ask
     for explicitly; this is a case where there should be a default.)
  -- In 99% of cases, you want "a project" to be what you store in a
     particular db.
  -- If we move away from having everything given globally unique
     names (branches, key names, even tags...), then we need some sort
     of "namespace" concept, that a group of collaborators can use to
     achieve a shared vocabulary.  Experience says that we really
     should move away from globally unique names.
  -- Higher-level process is all about relationships between branches.
     If you want to talk about "has this been merged back", "what
     branches are waiting review", etc., then you need something like
     a project scope.
  -- It matches how social groups organize around software
     development, and how people think and talk about software
     development.  For example, in speech practice, projects all get
     short names ("gcc", "monotone", ...) that refer a particular
     unified group of developers with some shared process.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"If you can explain how you do something, then you're very very bad at it."
  -- John Hopfield