Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: linus talk on git

[Jack Lloyd]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 02:41:33PM +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote:

> How do you avoid a signature?  Doesn't each revision still want at
> least one signed cert asserting that a changelog belongs to that
> revision?

Yes, but here that signed cert would be identical to the revision
cert itself.

I guess this is something of a semantic change - instead of the
changelog message saying "this is the revision I am attached to", the
revision states "this hash is a pointer to the changelog information
that describes me"; the changelog message itself is "inert", so to
speak, and doesn't point to anything. This does imply some
limitations, namely that the revision and the changelog for that
revision would have to be signed by the same key, and that you
couldn't attach more than one changelog entry to a revision (I guess
you could include an arbitrary-sized vector of changelog info hashes
into the revision if you really wanted).

Sorry if this doesn't make much sense, my knowledge of Monotone's
scheme is pretty vague, and mentally tainted from my work on OpenCM
which had a somewhat similar data representation.

> I doubt if checkout or update look at anything other than the branch
> (and testresult, and whatever's necessary for selector resolution)
> certs.

Ah, OK.

-Jack