Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Fwd: Re: FreeBSD's requirements for its future VCS

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 07:20:55AM -0500, address@hidden wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 12:42:39AM -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> > 
> > The two big questions about obliteration are:
> >   1) Do you want the data to simply be unavailable, or do you want to
> >      remove every trace of its existence?  Approaches like yours that
> >      leave the file hash in the manifest mean that even if the file
> >      itself is gone, it is always cryptographically provable that it
> >      _once_ was available.  Conceivably, you might be obliterating a
> >      file to preserve trade secret protection or to otherwise protect
> >      yourself legally, and leaving this kind of trail behind would be
> >      bad.
> >   2) How smooth does the obliteration process have to be?  Is it
> >      acceptable if mirrors require manual intervention?  Is it
> >      acceptable if workspaces have to manually recreated?
> > 
> > I would be curious to know what the FreeBSD folks's answers to these
> > questions were.
> 
> It looks as if these questions are not specific to monotone, but 
> inherent in any distributed system.  Except maybe if you have physical 
> controm of all the repositories.

Yes, these are general questions that need to be answered for any
system's obliteration support.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"The problem...is that sets have a very limited range of
activities -- they can't carry pianos, for example, nor drink
beer."