Recording tags in the history [was: Re: Promoting the use of Mercurial]

[Benoit Boissinot]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 04:37:08PM -0600, Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 11:39 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > So I'm curious --- why is having tags as part of history so important
> > to you; what workflows does this allow?
> 
> The purpose of a version control system is to record history. If tags
> are mutable, then they must be part of history. Otherwise, you'll be
> unable to answer questions like 'when was this tag added? who changed
> this tag? and what was it before?'. 
> 
> A decentralized tool has to assume everyone has equal privileges. This
> means everyone can add and modify tags in their own repos. It's also
> safe to assume that people will want other people's public tags. Ergo,
> there must be the same accountability for tags as there is for
> everything else. Which means the most reasonable thing to do is use the
> same mechanism.
> 

On this topic, is it necessary for this model to have tags interleaved
with regular commits?

Or could we just make tags/signatures/bookmarks and other metadata live
in a separate DAG? It would obviously need some UI work to "hide" this
maintenance branch and avoid merging it accidently with the "code" DAG.

cheers,

Benoit
-- 
:wq