Re: [Monotone-devel] Manifest Comments

[Thomas Moschny]

Markus Schiltknecht wrote:
> I thought into another direction: I was asking myself, what else such
> 'manifest comments' could be used for. And figured that many certs
> never change after the revision has been written, i.e. author,
> changelog and date. Why not store those the same way, we would gain
> delta compression for those (which might not actually be that much,
> given that author and changelog change quite often). We would loose
> the ability to quickly search through them, this would have to be done
> differently.
There's one corner case to be taken into account. Consider a branch with
two heads, and let's say they can be merged without conflicts (or the
conflicts can be solved in a straightforward manner). Now two developers
merge them independently. They end up with exactly the same revision
(with the very same hash), and when they sync later, we get one revision
with two author certs, two dates, and two changelogs. A bit strange at
first sight, but meaningful. Now, consider this with author, date, and
changelog being part of the revision (and thus the hash): The results of
the two developers doing the merge will not be the same, due to their
different author names, and (likely) due to their different commit date.
We end up with two 'merged' revisions, and the branch again has two
heads. After syncing, the devs have to do a merge again, ... and again,
... :)

- Thomas M.