monticello

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Thu Nov 21 07:45:33 UTC 2002


On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Stephen Pair wrote:

> It would be great to use VersionNumber to allow branching, but still give a
> warning message and confirm whether or not the user would like to a) update
> from the repository (as Monticello does now and avoid a branch) or b) commit
> a branch version of the package.  In my experience there is a real need for
> branching support.  It typically happens following a major release where you
> need to issue minor updates while simultaneously moving the product forward
> for the next major feature release.

Yes, branching is needed.  What you're describing there is more or less
how CVS does things - always merge on the client side, and explicitly
branch the working copy when needed.  The other model I'm considering is
how I'm told StORE does things - every commit is effectively a branch, and
you can ask the server to merge any two whenever you want.  With that
model, there's no merging on the client side - any update is
effectively a checkout.

Stephen, a question about VersionNumber - can you build a coherent
VersionHistory from a set of VersionNumbers, or is there some additional
state that needs to be kept?  Just wondering if I'd need to serialize a
VersionHistory instance for each repository.

As for lighterweight protocols than XML-RPC - well, XML-RPC is pretty darn
lightweight, but since you'll notice that there's only a small and well
separated bit of code that deals with the remote repository access, feel
free to send me an alternate implementation.  I'd be happy to lose some
dependencies.

Avi




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