Call for discussion: Phase names

Matt Mackall mpm at selenic.com
Mon Jan 9 14:52:57 CST 2012


On Mon, 2012-01-09 at 20:28 +0100, Olav Reinert wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> At the 2.1 mini-spring in Zürich last week-end, the names of the
> phases were discussed quite a lot, and it has also been a topic of
> much discussion here on the mailing list.
> 
> In order to reach a useful consensus in time for the 2.1 code freeze
> in mid-January, Pierre-Yves DAVID from Logilab has asked me to
> organize a conclusive discussion to decide on the phase names to use
> in the final release.
> 
> 
> The current (unacceptable) naming scheme is as follows:
> 
>     Name    Immutable   Shared
>     public      X         X
>     draft                 X
>     secret
> 
> (Even though the names of the changeset properties assigned to the
> phases (immutable and shared) have also been debated, their meaning is
> not disputed.
> 
> Most people seem to agree that "draft" is a good name for the middle
> phase, because it implies a work-in-progress that may be shared. The
> name "public" is disliked by some because it doesn't convey
> immutability, which is an important and distinguishing property of
> that phase.

Changesets become immutable because they've been made public (ie by
pushing them to a public server), not vice-versa.

I basically think 'public' and 'draft' are frozen. Not interested in
'published'.

>  The name "secret" is disliked because to some it suggests enforcement
> of confidentiality (i.e., that it's safe to check in trade secrets or
> nuclear launch codes), which is not the case, and not intended,
> either.

I've yet to see any good articulation of why we'd want to expose hashes
from this phase over the wire. It continues to seem self-evidently wrong
from a design perspective to do so: the client simply has no business
having visibility into these changesets. I will continue to be unhappy
with this regardless of what the phase is named.

>     personal, mine, isolated, tentative, shy, scratch, jailed, moored, anchored, grounded

I don't like any of these even a little. I think it needs to be
synonymous with private, which basically limits the possibilities to
'private', 'secret', and 'restricted'. 

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.




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