Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Future of monotone

[Thomas Moschny]

On Tuesday 29 January 2008 Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> My current feeling is that separating out signer from author is a bad
> idea.  The cost of having them is paid all the time
> different identities to worry about every time you print a log
> message, 

First, we already have this situation with the commit messages. With the 
proposal in its last form, there will only be additional author fields in the 
tag, suspend, and test-result certs, of which we don't have that many.

Second, we should probably ask our users what they really want. And if I 
remember correctly there were voices (from the Pidgin devs?) asking even for 
being able to store several authors. We also should have a look at what other 
VCSs do here - does e.g. git discriminate between author and signer?

Also, I don't think that printing the signer for log etc. is appropriate at 
all. The combination of signer and correct signature determines whether I'm 
actually accepting a cert, and does not necessarily count as the actual 
payload of the cert.

> The cost of not having them is this annoyance with database rebuilds, which
> are *very* rare, and for them ad hoc techniques suffice.  (For instance:
> just munge a note about the original author into the commit message
> programmatically.) 

Uh. This means that e.g. front ends would have to parse that again? And how do 
you know whether it was munged in programmatically or by hand?

- Thomas

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