[Monotone-devel] Re: Branches in git and monotone

[Graydon Hoare]

Markus Schiltknecht wrote:

> > What I'm wondering is... can monotone's approach represent some 
> > situation that git cannot?
>
> Hm. Good question. I guess it's a matter of taste, if you want the VCS 
> to provide shared branch names or if you are fine with relying on 
> everybody naming his local branches the same as you do.

Yes, it is absolutely about whether the tool maintains a shared branch 
namespace. In the same way monotone maintains shared notions of file 
identity, or integrates a (crude) public key distribution system: we 
decided to fold the logic into the tool rather than keeping it external.

In the case of git, branches are "a name at a URL at a point in time". 
The name depends both on URL continuity and the passage of time. That's 
not necessarily *bad*, it's just different. It comes with different 
costs and benefits. The cost is you have to pay attention to URLs and 
time. The benefit is that you don't have to come up with your own 
mechanism for managing a shared namespace, and you can do things like 
delete branches by mutating the set of branches found at a URL.

-graydon