Re: Which VCS besides git?

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 3, 2010, 11:58 UTC
Message-ID: <94a0d4531003030358q276a8e9bue086a8ec06aba395@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201003030241.16959.jnareb@gmail.com>

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> Kārlis Repsons wrote:
>> On Tuesday 02 March 2010 16:12:22 Jakub Narebski wrote:
>> > Kārlis Repsons <karlis.repsons@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> > > which VCS besides git provide chaining of commits with help of some
>> > > cryptographic hash function, warning about or not allowing commits to be
>> > > deleted on an equivalent of pull action, so that all added pieces of data
>> > > can be retained securely on client side?
>> >
>> > Could you rephrase your request in more clear way?
>>
>> On top of what you wrote already, I'd like to know which VCS have immutable
>> history, which can all be stored (say, gradually accumulated) on clientside? I
>> hope, that explained the idea...
>
> As I wrote, all VCS which use cryptographic hash function (digest) for
> commit identifier have immutable history.

That's not exactly correct. Monotone works very differently; a revision doesn't include the ancestry, that's handled in a separate structure, so the revision hash doesn't tell you anything about the ancestry. In fact, a revision doesn't contain anything, the data is handled by "certs", and certs can be added later.

For example, it's possible to clone a repository and then add a second commit message to a bunch of revisions. The revision hash doesn't change. Instead, they ensure security by signing every piece of data about a commit (commit date, author, commit message). So it's possible to have multiple commit dates, authors, messages, etc. each signed by a different person.

I'm not really fond of this approach :P

-- 
Felipe Contreras