! @%#/& BASE-PATH grrrrr!

(For the uninitiated: these are questions about the filesystem. :-) )

1) What's a BASE-PATH?

So we're using BASE-PATH to record a node's name in the base revision.
By all accounts, BASE-PATH is an atom, *and* it also happens to be a
list of directory entry names. No doubt containing spaces and using "/"
as a separator. ...

Is there any reason for that, or could we change the structure and make
BASE-PATH a list of ENTRY-NAMEs? Besades being easier to manipulate,
there would be no restrictions on the characters that can appear in a
file name.

We'd have to canonicalize the skel somehow when creating CLONE-KEYs, but
we have to do that anyway.

2) Cloning in parallel transactions

Imagine we have a node at revision 11.17. Two clients want to clone the
node at the same time: Client A in transaction 138547, and client B in
transaction 138581. (Yes, all of those are primes. :-) )

Now the questions:

a) What will (should) be the node revision id's of the clones?
b) How can we make sure (e.g., in the presence of aborted transactions)
that we have no "holes" in the revision id's? I.e., that the next
revision will be 11.18, not 11.19? Do we care?

I'm sure I'm missing something very basic here ...

-- 
Brane �ibej
    home:   <brane_at_xbc.nu>             http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
    work:   <branko.cibej_at_hermes.si>   http://www.hermes-softlab.com/
     ACM:   <brane_at_acm.org>            http://www.acm.org/