[E-Lang] cap-based design question

[Bill Frantz]

At 11:02 AM -0700 9/12/01, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>One of the very common cases in PCMS will be the case where an individual
>checks out a code base anonymously, and later becomes authorized to modify.
>This can happen either as a result of their creating a local branch (in
>which case they had a cryptographic identity, but it wasn't known to the
>server they checked out from), or as the result of being added to the
>project team after the initial checkout. Empirically, we run into this
>problem all the time with CVS -- we end up hacking our CVS/Repository and
>CVS/Root files to avoid the need to download again.

I will admit that I don't know why CVS ties itself in this particular knot.
It seems to me that the issue of avoiding redundant downloads is quite
separate from the issues of authority, and could be addressed with the use
of hashes.  If we know the hashes of each version of each file in the
repository, and the hashes of the versions that the user has, we can avoid
redundant downloads.  The issue of two files with the same contents can be
addressed by copying on the client side.

Cheers - Bill


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