> However, the advantage that the RCS-style numbers have is that,
> given two revision numbers, you can determine their relationship (if
> any) simply by inspecting the numbers --- no I/O is necessary. In
> your system, you might need to walk the node's entire history in the
> database before you could be sure they weren't related. This
> ability to quickly recognize related nodes was useful in computing
> deltas.
Assuming you actually actually meant "was useful" in that tense, can
you describe where you actually wind up using this feature of
node-revision IDs?
I have concerns about its actual usefulness. Suppose I create every C
source file in a source tree by copying copyright-template.c to a new
file, and every directory by copying directory-template to the new
place. Now all my C source files live in the same node and all my
directories live in the same node, but they don't have much in common.
What are you going to do with the information that two node-revisions
live in the same node? You can also compute the common ancestor of
two node-revisions, but again, what are you going to do with that?
(Especially keeping in mind that none of this information is visible
to the user, with the possible exception of some future interface
intended for GUI viewing of revision trees.)
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:21 2006