Re: [Monotone-devel] resolving name conflicts; file suturing vs drop

[Derek Scherger]

Thomas Moschny wrote:
> *But*, I changed my mind, and now think that we must care about file identity 
> relationships. What we really want, is this: Pretend we could go back and 
> give both 'foo' nodes in A and B the very same node identity. The whole 
> monotone merging machinery would work as expected.

Initially I really liked this idea, even though it does seem a bit 
strange to go back and rewrite the old rosters, it does accomplish 
suturing. However, on the way home today, it occurred to me that 
actually doing this may not be the right thing because it doesn't record 
history as it happened but actually changes the history which we're 
trying to preserve.

I'm back to thinking the right thing to do is to drop *both* old nodes 
and create a new one representing the suture, and to do whatever else we 
need to so that the new node somehow refers to both of its sources.

Similarly, for splitting a file (i.e. un-suturing) I think we should 
drop the original single node id and create two new ones that both refer 
to their single source.

For an asymmetric copy it seems reasonable to keep the source node and 
add a single new node representing the copy.

So, "all" we need is some way for a node to refer to 0, 1 or 2 source 
nodes (2 for a suture, 1 for an asymmetric copies and splits and 0 for 
simple additions). Then we need to work this through the merging machinery.

Cheers,
Derek