[RFC] making the null revision become real

[John A Meinel]

Aaron Bentley wrote:
> I like this idea in general.
> 
> Denys Duchier wrote:
>>> I'd like to propose to turn the null revision into an actual revision.  It
>>> should have revid "null:" i.e. bzrlib.revision.NULL_REVISION, and it should be
>>> present as the first revision in every branch's history.  
> 
> I think you also were including the idea that the revision would have
> real metadata associated with it, e.g. a log message.  I'm not quite as
> certain that this is a good idea.  For example, I think the inventory
> format pretty much demands that there be a root id, and the null
> revision is defined to have no root id.

I don't think the null: revision should have any meta-information
associated with it. You shouldn't have a committer, an inventory, etc.

In my head the only thing this changes is 'revision-history' now has one
more entry, which makes things line up nicely.

> 
> The other issue is that, until stores perform escaping on the ids,
> including ':' in the ID is incompatible with win32.  If we want to move
> faster than that, perhaps we should change the string, since so far, it
> hasn't been committed to disk.
> 

I have to get escaping working for a friend on win32 (because of an Arch
conversion), and my quick hack isn't working, so I'll probably end up
implementing it for real.

Since escaping requires a new branch format anyway, I don't think it
would be a big deal.

John
=:->


>>> This means that revnos
>>> no longer have to be offset; revno=0 is simply the null revision.  It also
>>> becomes trivial to branch off a newly created empty branch.  And we should no
>>> longer accept a revid=None to mean the null revision.  revid=None should only
>>> mean that a revid has not been provided.
> These all sound great.
> 
> Aaron


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